


Into the Badlands: Or, On Diplomacy Between Barbarians and Elves

by fadeverb



Category: The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Genre: Animal Death, Culture Shock, F/M, Kidnapping, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Multi, Slow Burn, Travelogue, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-14 13:52:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 52,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5746228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a young man of good family travels through the Elflands, witnesses many picturesque landscapes along the way, and then finds himself in an unexpected and prolonged detour among the barbarians of the steppes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the people of #thegoblinemperor over on Slashnet for encouraging me, helping me with canon compliance, and letting me borrow their usernames as roots for OC names as necessary. I blame everyone there for this ever being written.
> 
> Some liberties have been taken with the language of the Steppe people, for my own convenience and amusement, and are annotated when appearing. Any errors in spelling, cultural detail, or other such minutiae of canon are involuntary, and corrections there are always welcome.

Zheru was asleep at noon when his edocharis burst into the room. He kept his eyes firmly shut against the sudden onslaught of light from opened curtains, pointed sounds of bustling, and even more pointed clinking of the tea set.

"Mer Shadoär," Dasma said at last, "we are full aware that you are awake."

Zheru mumbled something noncommittal. The bed was perfectly comfortable, even if the room was overheated. Besides, there was no way to avoid overheating in the summer without installing one of those new ventilation systems which his mother called unseemly and his elder brother called ridiculous.

"Mer Shadoär--"

"We wish to wallow," Zheru said, "in something akin to grief, until perhaps two in the afternoon. You can bring in a breakfast then."

Dasma's footsteps drew near, and then his voice. "Mer Shadoär, with the utmost respect, we know that your heartbreak is transient. Your mother's absence _also_ transient, and thus she will appear in this room within the hour."

Zheru's eyes snapped open. "Transient."

Dasma's face was as impassive as ever, despite the urgency in his voice. Had Zheru not seen others of goblin blood with quite dramatic expressions, he might have grown up believing the calm of countenance some sort of inherent goblin trait. "Traversing the streets of Cetho as we speak."

Zheru heaved himself upright, and cursed. A broadsheet clung to his cheek, the topmost of those he had been sleeping on. "Today!"

That had been more an exclamation than a question, but his edocharis took it as the latter. "She came by airship, and had she not stopped at the house offices to speak with your brother first, she would be here now."

"She hates airships," Zheru said. He pulled the paper off his cheek, and set bare feet to the floor. "If we dress quickly enough, we might yet leave before--"

"Furthermore," Dasma continued, relentless as the seasons, "the message she sent from your brother's office instructed us to inform you of her approach, so that you might be waiting for her urgent words on her arrival here."

Zheru pulled the sweat-damp nightgown over his head, and flung it away. "Perhaps you missed us, as we had already left the residence by the time the message reached you."

Dasma observed him calmly for a moment. "Shall we bring you the blue jacket today, and pour you a cup of tea?"

"If it were up to you," Zheru said, "we would always be impeccably attired and at the mercy of our family's whims. The pale green, if you please." He moved himself without grace to the breakfast table, and drank tea while his edocharis assembled a wash basin and clothing formal enough for a serious meeting with Merrem Aansero Shadoäran, a woman almost as terrifying as she was wealthy. One might expect a woman meeting her own son to have somewhat lower expectations of formal clothing than she did when meeting with high-ranking employees of the house's business. This had not been the case since he was out of leading strings.

He spent a cup of tea trying to convince himself that he was properly heartbroken, and gave up by the time he had reached the dregs. Osmin Nedarin had been doing no more than entertaining herself with his affections, and they had both known it, whatever either of them said. Her family was not so destitute as to marry a woman of her breeding off to a man like him, nor so libertine as to turn a blind eye forever to her interest in unsuitable companions. And if she had been entertained, well, so had he. He was mourning not the loss of the woman, but the loss of her delightful company.

A fine distinction, to be sure, but a distinction all the same.

Dasma whisked away the tea set, and set the basin before him. "Has Mer Shadoär recovered from his heartbreak sufficiently to wash?"

"Rather more from the heartbreak than the hangover," Zheru said. His head was no longer pounding, nor were his eyes any more sensitive to the light than usual, but a touch of sympathy might get him through the braiding process with minimal tugging. "Do you have any idea what our mother desires of us?" He added rapidly, at his edocharis's first indrawn breath, "In particular on this day, rather than her general desires for us. And our life. And our future prospects, all the way down into the grave."

"You give your mother insufficient credit."

"Does she need any, given the house funds?" Zheru shied away from the damp cloth in Dasma's hand. "We are no longer five years old, to need assistance with our washing!"

"At five years old, Michen Zheru did not sleep on broadsheets, and wake with satirical drawings inked across his skin."

This was inarguable, and so Zheru did not argue, but submitted--with somewhat more grace, as the hour wore perilously onward--to Dasma's assistance. By the time half of the hour had fallen away, Zheru was nearly ready to meet his maker. The pale green coat made the warm room even more stifling, his hair sat in a complicated stick-pierced design atop his head like a weight, and Dasma assured him that his skin was free of inappropriate literature.

Zheru Shadoär sat primly at his desk, leaning over a volume of improving literature, and waited for his doom to arrive.

His doom arrived in a burst of noise downstairs. A full ten minutes passed, the absolute minimum time for Merrem Shadoäran to speak with the housekeeper and survey the state of the building, before his mother arrived at the door to his bedroom.

Zheru rose from the desk, took her hands, and kissed her cheeks. She gave him the same courtesy in return, and then collapsed into the most comfortable chair of the room with a sigh. "How shabby this place has become! Zheru, it is high time thy quarters were changed. Nearly twenty, and still in the nursery."

"It has not been the nursery since my sisters took to their own rooms," Zheru protested, taking a seat beside her. He could not deny that much of the furniture had a battered look to it, courtesy of more than a decade of childhood games played across all of them. The breakfast table had once been the northern steppes, populated by his sister's dolls as representation of the barbarian hordes there, and the bed he had been asleep in not an hour earlier had been the dark caves of the goblins to the south. His sisters used to drag him beneath it, shouting that the goblins would eat him, while he squealed in something between terror and glee.

Both his sisters were out of the house, respectably married, one with a son of her own. But the scuff marks did rather linger on the floorboards.

"Still the nursery," his mother said, and tweaked one of his ears. She smiled at the way they flattened against his head in self-defense. "Thy quarters are childish, and so, I am afraid, art thou, my son. What hast thou done all this time in my absence? Played with thy friends, and slept in until noon, I am certain."

"Certainly not." Zheru did not dare risk a look at Dasma's face--and why should he, when the goblin would wear as calm an expression as ever? His mother had never kept demonstrative servants for long. Melodramas were for novels, and children too young to be unaccompanied by nurses. "I have been studying, and--yes, I do speak with friends, but that can only help our house, to make those with power more favorable to us."

"More favorable to thee," she corrected, not ungently. "Favor is not like a coin, that a Baron hands to his son, who hands it to thee, that thou canst pass it along to the Shadoäda."

"The journey must have exhausted thee. To come in an airship! I know how thou hast spoken of them--"

"If His Serenity will travel by airship," Mother said, "how could I have any fear of such devices? Speak no nonsense." She patted him on the shoulder, as if he really were still a child, to sit on her lap and be easily comforted. "Dasma, will you fetch us some tea? We are not fatigued, but parched by this heat."

"Merrem," Dasma murmured, with a duck of his head, and left the room as rapidly as if he had been flung out the door. Which he might as well have been, once Mother had such a tone in her voice.

"When thy father returns," his mother said, the moment the door closed, "what will I say to him? That his oldest son is as established as when he left, his two daughters married well, and his youngest unchanged in all this time? I love thee dearly, Zheru, but thou canst not remain forever in the nursery, or forever in coffee houses full of disreputable sorts."

"The sons of barons drink coffee in those places--"

"For a baron's son, that is all very well, for a baron remains a baron, whatever his son might do. Thou and I, we must be more careful. Wealth may cushion us from much. Not everything." She squeezed his hand. Meant for a comfort, no doubt, but it only made him feel more the child, and resentful for it. "I have heard reports of the kind of talk that infests such places. I have _seen_ some of the pamphlets. Dost thou deny it?"

"One may criticize governmental policies without venturing anywhere near sedition," Zheru said. In truth, more conversation was spent on discussing gambling parlors, opera singers, and the latest novels than on any political matter, but he felt this would not form a useful defense in his mother's eyes. "An were my father ever to return--"

"He will."

"Five years, Mother! That is quite beyond hoping."

"Sea voyages are full of delays," she said. " _When_ your father returns, I mean for him to encounter two sons well-established in their work. Now." She sat back, taking her hand from his knee, and transformed from his mother back into Merrem Shadoäran, terror of factory foreman and laggard maids alike. "Hadst thou shown any desire to enter the university, so it would have been done. Or to pursue any other proper vocation!"

"What of improper ones?" Zheru asked. His ears drooped at her look. "My apologies, Mother."

"Since thou hast _not_ shown such desires, thy brother and I have managed the matter for you."

"Lancathis is never happier than when he manages the lives of others, to be sure."

"Impertinence suits thee poorly at this age." His mother arched one perfectly maintained eyebrow, and held that look as Dasma returned with a tea service. "Now, that being settled, thou wilt desire the details. Tomorrow morning, at dawn, Lancathis will accompany thee to a caravan in need of supervision."

"I have," Zheru said, "not the slightest idea how to supervise a caravan. Besides, I have already accepted a dinner engagement--"

"Several, no doubt," his mother said, gliding serenely over his words. "Every time, Zheru, every time I bring thee an opportunity, thou hast an appointment, an arrangement, a sudden passion for other work, and this time I will see the matter through. Thou mayest send thy apologies to those expecting thee for dinner, but thou mayest not avoid this task, my son."

"But, Mother--"

"Thou mayest also be glad that thy brother has a caravan setting out at this moment, in need of thy attendance," she said, "or I might have begun seeking a proper wife to correct thy wanderings, instead."

Zheru tried to unpin his ears from the side of his head. "Yes, Mother," he said. What else _could_ he say?

#

Dinner was a delicious, miserable event. The cook, clearly in fear for her continued employment every time the mistress of the house looked her way, had deployed Merrem Shadoäran's favorite dishes with the best ingredients available and to her highest skill. As these were largely Zheru's favorite dishes as well, he could not even take refuge in feeling displeased about anything on the table. The lamb was shaved into curls of nearly transparent meat, and then folded artistically with summer greens: it was the third dish brought out, and followed by as many again. Meanwhile, the conversation circled endlessly around the Shadoäda obsession: business. His mother and brother could discuss interest rates over salad, silkworm futures over soup, and be joined by his sister Dameän for a rollicking conversation about lace fashions (and how they would affect factory production line management) between bites of that perfect lamb. And it didn't stop there. Why would any of them stop discussing business, when the topic charmed them more than the meal?

Zheru dug his way through the last round of rolls stuffed with a sweet ginger paste, and wondered at his chances of escaping the room for one last night at a coffee house with friends.

"I was younger than Zheru," his brother was saying--to their sister, as if she were the true target of such an illustrative anecdote--"the first time Father took me with him to observe the management of a trading expedition. Even in these days, when they move with almost the regularity of clockwork, I remember what I learned from the voyage."

Dameän propped her chin on her hand. "I remember when I was his age," she said, "and begged for a chance to travel along a single route, while thou--"

"It would not have been proper," Lancathis said hastily. "Not for a woman."

"Women travel the roads nearly as often as men, brother," she said sweetly. "Quite respectable women, of all sorts!" It was difficult to imagine her, as she dissected their brother's logic, as the girl he remembered from the nursery, whispering stories of ogres to him after the lamps were out. "Respectable enough for you to hire in the caravans, yes?"

"Wouldst thou like to take my place?" Zheru asked. "Supervise the caravan as well as thou dost your own household staff, and all will be well."

"Thou wouldst do what in return? Comfort my husband in my absence?" 

Lancathis laughed, and Zheru could feel his own ears heat.

"For shame," said their mother mildly, "is that the sort of conversation thy dinner table contains?"

Dameän reached for a ginger roll of her own. "No, Mama, never. We only speak of business, praise His Serenity's latest edicts, and then I darn my husband's socks until an early bedtime. Exactly as thy own evenings must have gone, when thou wert first married."

The evening improved somewhat, after that. But Zheru was entirely unable to sneak away, and found himself at last bundled off to the early bedtime his sister had joked about. Unlike _her_ , he had to fall into bed alone.

#

At the first crack of dawn, Zheru was on his feet and no longer charitably inclined toward any member of his family. He took long breaths of the muggy air, standing in the yard in front of the residence. It was a fine yard, paved with smoothly interlocking stone, and suitable for holding half a small trade caravan on its own, if need be. At the moment it held only him, his edocharis, and the smell of bread baking from the kitchen.

"Ah," Zheru said, in the quiet. "We see that our brother has not appeared. He must have changed his mind. We will return to bed, by way of the kitchen."

Dasma said nothing, and neither did he make any move back toward the door. He stood quite solidly with the three bags that had appeared that morning, packed somewhere out of Zheru's sight. Two for his clothing and such, one for various useful tools and Dasma's own change of clothing. The set would have been excessive for a visit to a friend's hunting lodge, and seemed downright paltry for a caravan that would take him two weeks from home--weather permitting--and delay him just as long in return.

"We know nothing about caravans, in any case," Zheru muttered. "Except for what the novels say about them, and we suspect they do not come under attack from brigands with political motives half so often as the stories claim." A heavy hand dropped onto his shoulder, and he started.

"This is how a man learns his work," Lancathis said. "By the practice of it."

"Has the caravan consented to be practiced on?" Zheru asked. The words slipped out more waspishly than he had intended. He had slept poorly, and did not much like the prospect of moving through the city streets with his hair done in a simple traveling braid.

"The caravan runs much like clockwork," Lancathis said. "Wound up, it turns about exactly as it has every time before. Thou wilt be the winder, and then an observer of the gears."

"Dealing in clockwork," Zheru said. "Rather new-fangled, as a business proposition. What would Mother say?"

His brother clapped him on the shoulder. "She would tell thee to mind thy tongue and thy manners with respect to thy elders. Now take your mount."

Within ten minutes, the three of them were settled on uninspiring mounts from the house stables. There was a single decent hunter, belonging to Lancathis in name and to Zheru in practice, and gentler riding horses, along with a matched set for their mother's carriage and cart horses for practical heavy duty work. Lancathis had taken one of the riding mares, suitable for a half day's ride to the caravan and back; Dasma had a mule used by servants traveling to distant markets and greenhouses for specialty ingredients; and Zheru's own horse was a new one entirely, a gelding sturdy in frame and dull in color. It plodded forward behind the mare as if it had never thought of a canter in its life, and might continue that same steady walk until it died of old age.

The street where the Shadoäda residence stood was quiet at dawn, with none but servants moving about, and those quietly. As the sun crept up and the horses ambled on, life sprang up around them, and noise in equal measure. Children at errands or play scampered across the streets at perilous proximity to wagon wheels and hooves, and workers in uniform or shabbier clothing made their way to places of employment. Zheru counted off streets in his head as he passed them. A favorite coffee house here, the route to a playhouse there, here the house of an acquaintance, there jeweler's shop he favored, a brothel he had never quite dared to visit slipping past on his left.

_Good morning to thee,_ he thought to a printshop he had spent a fascinating afternoon at, watching the plates slam down. _Midsummer will have come and gone before I see thee again. Farewell to you, unwelcoming house of our brother's friends, we will be glad to see little of you for a month. Hello, road we have not followed before: we must make your acquaintance now, and hope there will be no unpleasantries between us, as our acquaintance will last for some time._

"We have never seen the Istandaärtha," he observed to his brother, as the street became what might be more properly termed a road. Buildings still stood on either side, more often than not, but they held more of the greenhouses of the nobility than they did the close-packed residences and shops of Cetho proper.

"You have, some decade and a half in the past. We took you down to the banks to greet Father on his return from a long trip." Lancathis gazed into the distance as if it might reveal the past as well through sufficient study. "You were four years old, and spent the entire ride attempting to fling yourself off our saddle toward whatever caught your eye. When Father arrived, we were fishing you out of the water below the dock, with the help of a ferrywoman."

"You should have taken our sisters. _They_ never would have behaved so badly."

"It always pleased our father to see his sons." Lancathis tapped his mare's sides with his boot, once again a man of business with his eyes on the road ahead. "Do hurry up, Zheru, or you'll delay the caravan."


	2. Chapter 2

No ferrymen were required to fish Zheru out of the river, as his plodding horse stopped when those in front of it did. On foot, he might have walked right off the edge of the dock, as his attention had been fixed on the enormous edifice growing on the banks of the Istandaärtha since it first drew into view. From a distance, he had found it intriguing: from scarcely a fifth of a mile away, it was breathtaking. Workers swarmed the building site with the same sense of purpose bees displayed at their hives, and already two dozen carts were drawn up nearby with the latest round of supplies for unloading and installation. Some sort of clockwork mechanism had been mounted on a wagon bed, the wagon itself lashed securely into a fixed position, and the mechanism extended a two-fingered metal hand down towards a pile of steel rods. Zheru was reminded of Dasma in the mornings, selecting the tashin sticks for the day's hairstyle.

"We will only be a moment," Zheru began, nudging his horse toward the site.

Lancathis leaned over from his mare to grab the gelding's reins. "Thou shalt do nothing of the sort," he said, voice pitched low. " _We_ ," and the plural was emphatic there, "will take this ferry the moment they are prepared to launch, and have thee attached to the caravan before any further hare-brained notions enter thy head."

"But the bridge--"

"Will cause fascinating disruptions in the market, no doubt! We may discuss this matter on the ferry."

"His Serenity," Zheru said doggedly, "shows an interest in the bridge, and so it is entirely proper for me--" He realized he was speaking more loudly than appropriate for a completely private conversation, outside of their own house. "--for us to take an interest as well."

"Be interested from the ferry," Lancathis said.

In short order, the horses, mule, baggage, and riders were all bundled onto the ferry. Dasma remained with the horses, as the riding mare was fidgeting uncomfortably at the way the boards shifted gently even while the ferry remained moored. Zheru and Lancathis were given the cleanest bench at the rails in the passenger section, roped off from the area where other beasts of burden, and one covered wagon, were deposited. Other passengers filed into place on rougher benches, chatting idly amongst themselves.

Without his brother looking on, Zheru might have attempted a conversational opener of his own. A young woman with a pale gray tint to her skin, black curls cut short around her ears, watched him sidelong with an encouraging smile. No doubt if he did try such a thing, Lancathis would politely intervene, and then at the next private moment, there would be a lecture about inappropriate connections, or implying promises one had no intention of keeping. Or a repeat of that mortifying discussion the night of his fifteenth birthday, and that was a topic of conversation Zheru hoped to never hear from his brother on again. Especially as their father had given a much better account of the matter when Zheru turned thirteen.

He leaned back against the railing, his braid hanging out in the sunlight not blocked by the canopy overhead, and watched the bridge construction pull away. More suitable than conversations with pretty women, no doubt. Clockwork was almost as proper as magic or silk or law, when it came to topics of interest for a young man contemplating a future career. Perhaps, if he set his mind in the correct direction, clockwork was his true passion in life.

Zheru could not keep up that pretense, even as idle fantasy, once the bridge site had receded in the distance to an uninteresting smudge of building material. He had pulled apart a clockwork toy once, and given up on trying to fit the pieces back together within a quarter hour. A man bound on such a career would have apprenticed to a master at thirteen, or fifteen at the latest. At nineteen, his career prospects were narrowing to those which did not expect adolescent passion, talent, or training.

There were always various gods to dedicate oneself to, not all of which required isolation or celibacy. Most gave at least nominal rules about penury. He could not picture himself as either the sort of priest who flouted such rules, or the type who adhered to them. Even if religion was becoming slightly more fashionable again, it didn't seem like a lifestyle full of the entertainment he preferred. Were priests allowed to attend operas and visit coffee houses? Surely _some_ types were, but he couldn't remember meeting any of them.

"A fine day for crossing," said an elderly man to no one in particular.

"Summer days are always are," said a woman in tidy, worn clothing, a lockbox perched on her knees. A banking clerk, or one for some lawyer? She hadn't any signs of being a clerk for Witnesses, or otherwise a palace employee, but that combination of carefully cleaned somber clothing without any other signs of wealth usually placed a person somewhere in that constellation of professions. Clerks for merchants were either poorer or more brightly dressed.

"Ah, there are summer storms that can roar down the river without an hour's warning," said the old man, having been given the opening he so clearly wanted. "Back in my day..."

Zheru hung his head back, and stared at the blue sky against the edge of the canopy. From that angle, there was no way to see if the sky were moving, or the ferry, or if the two were pinned together in one place. Floating in the middle of the Istandaärtha forever, like the story of the princess who would not believe she was dead. The old man's voice was a pleasant drone in the background.

He would have fallen asleep in that position, if not for his brother's elbow being applied to his ribs at periodic intervals.

#

The caravan had none of the charm Zheru associated with the phrase, courtesy of too many novels of banditry and piracy. In the stories, mercenary guards rubbed shoulders against mule-drivers with amusingly rural accents, and the caravan leader was either a disguised relative of one of the heroes, or plotting to betray everyone to the bandits. He had known the reality, given his family's occupation, but had largely avoided seeing proof of it until now. A caravan was merely eight wagons, their mule-drivers, and a handful of other people, none of them mercenary soldiers.

A good emperor, his mother had said more than once, kept the roads free of bandits so that trade could flourish. Given the Shadoäda's wealth, one could only conclude that Varenechibel IV had been an excellent emperor, and his son was continuing the tradition. For all that many of their silk suppliers were predicting a collapse of silk prices and quality once the bridge was finished, Merrem Shadoäran felt otherwise. Zheru knew whose predictions of business opportunity he would bet more money on.

If his mother allowed gambling, which she certainly did not. It was, like many things, acceptable among the nobility for reasons of tradition, and vulgar when practiced by common folk, however wealthy.

_Let us not be vulgar, or we would have no reason left to sneer at merchant houses even wealthier than our own._ He covered a smile at the thought with the back of his hand, as if he had yawned, and followed Lancathis to where the caravan leader waited.

Mer Nemola was a stocky man of somber mien, hale even in his late fifties. He had visited the Shadoäda residence two or three times before, invited to dinner on the rare occasions when employees of great standing and responsibility were called together for congratulation on another year of profit. When Zheru had first seen the man, being nine years old himself and proud to be allowed at the common table, he had spent the entire evening staring across the table at Mer Nemola's artificial ear.

As an adult, Zheru had the manners not to do so, though the man was proud of that appendage. Cunningly formed out of a length of thin white leather, it appeared natural at a distance, and was fastened well enough to the stump of the ear that it moved cleanly from that point. The simple iron earrings with their glass gems matched between the two ears, real and unreal, to further the illusion. Mer Nemola's ears tilted back, and forward, in near unison as the brothers approached. One might almost suspect he had begun to wonder when they would arrive.

"Mer Nemola. You know our brother, Zheru." Lancathis gripped Zheru by the shoulder, as if he might otherwise bolt.

"An honor always to work with the Mers Shadoär," Mer Nemola responded politely, without further comment, and short bows were exchanged all around.

Lancathis continued in an equally polite manner for a few minutes wherein it became perfectly clear that Zheru would have all the honor, such as it was, of leading the caravan, and leave all of the work, of which there was a great deal, to Mer Nemola. _They might as well have nailed me to the prow of a ship, for all the skill I bring to this expedition,_ Zheru thought sourly. _Though in truth, that would be preferable, as an expedition at sea might bring some novelty that summer roads will not._

All too soon, the introductions were over, and Lancathis was mounting up to return alone. He leaned down toward Zheru from the mare's back. "All will be well, little brother."

"An I am eaten by hobgoblins--"

"None of those infest the roads," Lancathis said. "Nor trolls, nor any other inhabitants of wonder tales." He clapped Zheru on the shoulder. "Thou wilt return by autumn, having lost nothing but a touch of thy feckless habits. Be as shrewd as our mother and brave as our father."

"As serious as my brother, as daring as our sisters?"

"Not so daring as all that, Zheru. I would have thee back alive, and thou hath none of their skill in avoiding punishment." His smile was brief, and no less sincere for it. "As I said. All will be well. Only keep thy eyes open, lest some other river swallow thee up in thy wandering!" On that comment, he tapped his heels into the mare's flanks, and left for the ferry docks at a brisk trot.

Zheru turned around, rather than watch him go. "Well," he said to Dasma, who had stood at a distance near enough for easy response, and far enough to pretend the conversation between brothers was entirely private. "We may as well begin."

#

The first stage of a caravan journey was hardly a stage at all: the wagons spent half a day plodding along at a leisurely pace toward an inn at a crossroads. Most all traders setting out toward the west passed through this point, and thus the so-called inn was nearly a manor house in size. Its courtyard could hold dozens of wagons with all their harnessed teams, drivers, cooks, guards, merchants, and so forth that came attached to such mobile collections of goods. The inn's buildings held not only rooms for paying guests to sleep--ranging from bare floors where mule drivers would bunk down to featherbeds for the sake of accommodating some illustrious nobleman--but also stalls for clerks from Cetho's banks, entire shops for vendors of travel gear, and a small brothel tucked away behind the more respectable rooms. 

Zheru found it almost overwhelmingly crowded, and surprisingly dull. The bustle was like being back in the city, but none of the entertainment options were. The dining rooms served tea, small beer, and nothing else; the shops sold nothing but the most practical of equipment; all the posted signs were made out in pictures, without so much as an angry broadsheet nailed to a door; every person he passed moved at a brisk clip, like his brother's horse. He found himself tagging along behind Mer Nemola for lack of better options, and out of a vague fear that he might never find the man again if they became separated in the crowd.

This took the two of them to a bank clerk's stall, where Mer Nemola signed several different papers and swore an oath of honest intent. The clerk gave them a sealed and stamped paper, which Mer Nemola then took across the inn courtyard to a different clerk entirely. She examined the seals of the paper closely, added her own, then sent them on to a warehouse across the courtyard again. There, at last, after further examination of the paper, the warehouse overseer opened its doors.

Bolts of woven silk moved from the warehouse to the wagons of Mer Nemola's caravan. (The wagons of House Shadoäda's caravan, as legal ownership read the matter, but Zheru was certain of who had control of the matter here at the warehouse.) Mer Nemola watched closely as each as the bolt was carried past by the warehouse workers, stopping them every three or five bolts to let him unroll the material a few feet, test the weight of the bolt in his own arms, or inspect the edges of the fabric. Zheru could see no difference between one stretch of cloth and the next, but for the different colors it had been dyed; yet at one point Mer Nemola unrolled a bolt a yard, then another yard, then called the warehouse overseer over, and finally sent it back entirely. 

No argument was given at this decision. Zheru wondered if the flaws, invisible to his eyes, were so obvious to all the others, or if the overseer meant to pass that same bolt to a less cautious merchant.

The sun was beginning its lazy descent when six wagons had been packed full of carefully wrapped silk bolts, barred, and locked. Mer Nemola turned his master key in each lock personally. When he had finished, he turned to Zheru, and presented him with key, still hanging on a leather thong. "Mer Shadoär. For your safe-keeping."

"As the caravan leader, no doubt you ought to keep the key," Zheru said uneasily.

"We keep the key to the lockbox of travel funds, which will suffice for our management on the journey. You, however, ought to have the key to the merchandise, as representative of your house."

Zheru lowered his voice. "You do realize that we have no idea how any of this works, don't you? Surely our brother conveyed this to you. You are still the caravan leader."

"Mer Shadoär," repeated the man, with the slightest emphasis on the house name, " _you_ are representative of your brother, and your father, and your entire house, in this place. We merely handle the details."

Zheru took the key, and might have stood there for an awkward moment of uncertainty if Dasma had not approached as if summoned. His edocharis slipped the thong over Zheru's neck, and tucked the key away into invisibility beneath his shirt, as if Dasma had settled the key in place this way as often as he had braided Zheru's hair or pinned the cuffs of his jacket.

Mer Nemola nodded at the completion of this. "Your brother had a room prepared for you in the inn tonight," he said, "along with your edocharis, though accommodations on the road will vary."

Zheru took the opportunity while it was granted, and seized the directions to his room with both metaphorical hands. It was a long hike upward; the most illustrious rooms were, for reasons he found obscure, located on the fifth floor. His room was _not_ one of those made for nobility, but still as comfortable as his bedroom back home, and nearly as spacious. A pallet beneath the bed had already been prepared for Dasma.

Zheru threw himself on the bed. "We will die of boredom," he said. "Did you pack us any reading material?"

"Most certainly we did," Dasma said, sounding a touch offended.

"Any reading material that is not _improving_ , Dasma? Or has it all been checked by our brother for suitability?"

"By your mother," Dasma admitted. "We fear it does tend toward the dry and business-like."

Zheru closed his eyes. Riding in the sun for half a day had already left him with a headache, and that on a road shaded on each side by ancient trees. "We will have to procure a hat. Or perhaps a seat next to one of the mule-drivers, with their canopies. We absolutely refuse to ride for weeks and weeks in the summer sun. You will bring us back to Cetho half-mad from being sun-dazed so long, and our family will have to lock us in the attic, like the wicked mad grandmother of the story."

"Should it come to that," Dasma said, "we will be certain to keep scissors and candles out of your hands."

Zheru sighed. This was not followed by expressions of sympathy from Dasma, but he had not expected any.

"Tell us," he said, rolling over on his side to face the man, "how terrible will all of this be? For you have more experience of the world than we do, and have traveled further, have you not?"

Dasma never looked surprised, but he did pause a moment as he hung out clothes for the following day. A shirt appropriate for riding hunters, or creeping into the back rows of a bear-baiting pit, would no doubt serve just as well for a day of leading a caravan. "We have lived in Cetho since before you were born, Mer Shadoär."

"Yes, for we remember when you called us Michen Zheru, and gave us rides about the house on your shoulders."

"Until you nearly lost an eye to a doorframe."

"Entirely the fault of the door," Zheru said. "It should have seen us coming, and avoided my head. However, we feel you are avoiding the topic. Ought we not ask after your mysterious past?"

"There is very little of mystery." Dasma finished hanging the clothes, and came over to help Zheru from his jacket, which required Zheru sit up and discard the pretense of languid despair on the bed entirely. "We were born in Barizhan, though we do not remember it, as our mother traveled north before our third birthday."

"Following a lover?" Zheru asked. "A falling out with her family? Pursuing advancement? A desire for travel?"

"In truth," Dasma said, undoing Zheru's cuffs, "we never asked her. At ten, we apprenticed to a cobbler, and soon discovered we had no talent for cobbling. To a tailor, where we had more success. At fourteen, we left the tailor, whom we loved but little, and traveled north until we reached Cetho some years later. Then, at twenty, we became edocharis to your father, then your brother, and now to you."

"A rapid tale," Zheru said, "For the time covered. We feel you have left out many an interesting event."

"None suitable for Mer Shadoär," Dasma said, whipping the coat off.

"Mer Shadoär would be our brother, or our father. Very proper men, the both of them. Would any of the stories be suitable for Zheru, who is less reputable than either?"

"Not if Mer Zheru Shadoär wishes to become reputable," Dasma said blandly, and that was all Zheru could get out of him on the topic for the evening.


	3. Chapter 3

Dawn departures were not some terrible invention devised by Lancathis to annoy his younger brother, but a standard feature of merchant travel. Zheru found himself chivvied relentlessly out of bed by Dasma when the windows of his room had barely shaded to a dark gray. Rather like the color of Dasma's skin, Zheru thought muzzily, as his edocharis stuffed him into clean clothes for the day. Goblins at night, those of mixed background at dawn, and...did that make elves noon-ish? He stared at his own fingers as Dasma buttoned coat cuffs into place. The sun was usually portrayed as golden, not milk-white.

"Our simile has broken," he told Dasma.

"It is far too early for poetry," Dasma replied. "Do you wish breakfast?"

"We never eat breakfast." Zheru yawned widely. "Though a cup of tea would not go amiss."

He thus found himself atop the plodding gelding as sunrise painted the edges of the clear sky yellow and rose, fortified with nothing but tea. The courtyard of the inn had already become a noisy place, as several other wagons set out, alone or in similar caravans. Those who had come by foot, horse, or carriage slumbered on, as best anyone could through that noise. Not all travelers counted their days against fluctuations in the price of silk.

Or the price of clockwork, for that matter. It was not, as his mother pointed out--more frequently since the announcement of the bridge--merely toys and clocks, but an increasing array of useful tools for the common folk as well as novelties for the rich. The clockwork soldiers he wound up as a child bore little resemblance to that enormous device with its two-fingered metal hand that had picked up iron rods at the bridge site, in much the same way a child's woven bracelet bore little resemblance to the emperor's court garb. But the two came from the same origins, much as the bracelet and clothing were both derived from the humble, ugly silkworm on its mulberry leaves.

"Imagine," he said to Dasma, "if all these mules were replaced with automatons, and the savings we would make in feeding them." Six of the wagons were given to the silk bolts, and one to all manner of supplies for the people of the caravan; the eighth wagon carried nothing but grain, hay, and water barrels. Enough, his mother had once told him, to carry the caravan through two stops without expected resupply, if no supplies were waiting. Only pinch-penny fools traveled without emergency supplies for their animals, trusting that no delay or disaster would strand them on the road.

True, a military patrol would rescue stranded travelers, finding any upon the main roads. That would not be a comfortable rescue, or an inexpensive one. His mother told stories of merchants bankrupted by their own lack of planning the way other mothers spoke of trolls lurking in dark alleys to eat naughty children.

"Imagine the winding," Dasma said.

"Ah, we would simply create mule-winders, also from clockwork, to wind the mules."

"Who would wind the mule-winders?"

"Another automaton, until all the caravan could be a line of wagons with a single man winding the winders of the winders." Zheru drew in a deep breath of muggy morning air. "No doubt that man would have enormous arm muscles, and find the journeys just as tedious."

"We find tedium comes from letting ourselves think of nothing, rather than of how we can make ourselves useful."

"One might almost take that as reproach," Zheru said. He looked back over his shoulder. Already the inn had become small and indistinct behind them, as all things did when given enough distance. His sister Amedro had explained why, but he no longer remembered the details. The curve of the world beneath them, and the tiny particles in the air that made vision blur at great distances, like looking through deep water.

There was a fine metaphor almost within reach, about distance and detail and memory, compared to the curve of the world and the composition of the air. He struggled with it for a few moments, and then gave up on the effort. His family would support his pursuit of many professions: poetry was not among them.

Besides, all the praise in his circles of friends went to satirical poetry, which he had no knack for. Pastoral poetry was rather old-fashioned, and narrative poetry largely the provence of tales for children. Didactic poetry still had some power, but he could not come up with a topic he could write a didactic poem on. How to follow modern fashion? In truth, Dasma could produce that poem to even better effect. What a sobering thought that was.

He glanced over to where his edocharis rode on a mule keeping even pace with his gelding, an indictment of the horse's spirit if he had ever seen one. The man stared ahead as if there were nothing in his head but the next stop, or thoughts of lunch. That couldn't possibly be the case. "Dasma, have you ever written poetry?"

"No, Mer Shadoär."

"Have you ever _wanted_ to write poetry?"

"Perhaps," Dasma said, his voice as calm as his face, "you might question the mule drivers on this matter, for we are certain they have as much interest in poetry as we do."

There was a tooth-jarring kernel of wisdom in the center of what Dasma had said. Zheru convinced his horse to leave its mule companion, and set out to introduce himself to all the people of the caravan, from the first to the last.

The first was Mer Nemola, who needed no introduction; he drove the mule team at the wagon of supplies for elves rather than mules, his eyes on the road ahead. A boy of thirteen or fourteen, stamped with a distinct family resemblance, sat alongside him or ambled beside the wagon, ready to run down the line with any messages more complex than a simple bellow could carry. The boy ducked away every time Zheru looked his direction, ears turning pink, and so there was no getting a name out of him.

The second, third, and fourth wagons, all heavy barred and full of silk bolts, were driven by three men of similar age and face: Covez, Henu, and Green Covez, the last one so-called for the brilliance of his green eyes. The first two were brothers, and the third their cousin; their fathers had been mule-drivers before them. "A family trade," one of them said, ducking his head to Zheru, "as long as there have been mules, or so says our grandpapa. All our cousins are in the same trade."

"Do any of your cousins work in Cetho?" Zheru asked, and the men stared at him as if he had said something quite odd. They conveyed at last, through a roundabout series of comments, that city hauling was an entirely different line of business from what they did, just as city folk were different from their family, and never the two did meet. Except for conversations such as these, in which rich boys from the city might ask foolish questions, which they were in turn much too polite to call foolish to his face.

The fifth wagon, another for silk, had a driver whose name was Lanan, and Zheru could acquire no other information from her. She was older than his mother, or at least had the look of that, and answered all his attempts at conversation with the least encouraging response available to one still wishing to be considered polite.

The sixth had a slim, jolly man named Remandis at the reins, and a small girl on either side of him. He was a widower, whose wife had been taken by the red fever when their younger daughter was only two years of age. Having no near relatives willing to take in the children, Remandis had simply taken the girls with him onto the road, and there they had been ever since, learning how to groom mules, perform chores, and otherwise make themselves useful enough to justify what little they ate. The youngest was now six years old, and as brightly garrulous as her father; the older daughter, a more sedate nine, and as wary of strangers as the boy in the first wagon--who was, the little girl informed Zheru, Mer Nemola's sister's youngest son, on only his second trip, and with no new stories to tell. The child seemed to believe the last was the greatest crime a boy could commit, and Michen Covo had wheedled a promise of a new story out of Zheru before he rode on down the line.

The seventh driver, on the last of the silk wagons, was Noda, a man unfortunate enough to have a lazy eye and stumbling speech both. He delivered his sentences with care, mangling every third or fourth word all the same. Zheru affected not to notice; they chatted for a few minutes about the clear day. "Good for peppers," Noda offered shyly. "The hotter, the...hotter."

At the final wagon, Zheru discovered Eikho, a woman solidly positioned between twenty and thirty, and built just as solidly in turn. She had a square face as unlike the charmingly narrow faces of the nobility as mastiffs were unlike weasels, and she laughed like a donkey braying. He liked her immediately. She explained the position of her wagon, with all the water and feed for animals: it was lighter than those full of silk bolts, as it had not been built to resist theft and the elements alike, even aside from the weight of its cargo, and so took up the last point in line, being potentially faster than all the other wagons. "None of them can lag behind without being noticed, this way," she said, "and should any of the mules of the heavier wagons founder, this team can be reduced to fill that one out." She made a warding sign against misfortune as she said that.

"Does that happen often?" Zheru asked.

"Every three or five trips, belike. Every ten, for serious injury. Less often than with oxen, though they pull more heavily. A good ox will pull you to the end of the world. A good mule has the sense to stop before walking off the edge of it."

Zheru wondered if she believed the world to be a sort of flat plate. It seemed more polite not to ask. "So the mules are as clever as horses."

"As clever!" She laughed, so loudly that his gelding flicked an ear and rolled an eye at the noise. "More clever! The army uses mules for wagons, horses for riding into battle. Why? A mule has too much sense to charge toward danger."

Zheru felt a certain kinship to mules; he had reacted similarly the one time his sisters suggested he take a commission in the army. His sisters surely would have done better in such a position, were either of them allowed to take on the challenge; Dameän had spent the ages of eleven to fourteen threatening to disguise herself as a boy and do exactly that, until she filled out too much to make the fantasy plausible any longer. 

Eikho, in turn, had a great many opinions on mules, which she delivered to him in a cheerful rattle as the caravan lumbered on down the road. She spoke to him of conformation as they passed pastures still clinging to tinges of green in the summer heat. Farm dogs in wide leather collars bounded up to the stone pillars and split wood bars marking the edges of each field, barking now and again to make their opinions on territory clear. Then it was a discussion of how to decide which jacks to set to which mares, given limited stock and the convoluted politics of small-herd mule breeders. The road curved around an enormous tree too sacred to be cut while Eikho attempted to explain the politics to him; the intermarriages, feuds, alliances, and surreptitious scheming against each other among mule-breeders seemed as complex as any the nobility of the Elflands had ever managed to carry out.

Though, to give credit to the families who had gathered enough livestock to extract themselves from the peasantry, and clung fiercely to their property there on the border of the classes, the mule-breeders seemed less prone to coup or assassination attempts. The wild conflicts of those people that Eikho told him about came down to a few drunken fist-fights, and exciting recent accusations of a particular jack donkey having been smuggled away in the middle of the night to set to a neighbor's mares without paying the stud fee.

"The magistrate," Eikho said, with withering scorn, "told the family that one donkey is like another, and how could they prove which one sired the foals? When any fool could see _that_ jack was the only one in miles that had the coloring to produce a dun foal with a mare of that color!"

"Truly," Zheru said, "we had not been aware of the complexity of coat color inheritance in mules."

"It's much as with horses," Eikho said. "Ah, Mer Shadoär, we need a moment at the reins. See the bridge yonder? Traffic is close at this hour."

Zheru nudged the gelding away to give Eikho the space she so politely asked for. The bridge ahead was one of the curved type, constructed of ancient interlocking stones, as bridges always were in the storybooks. The road beneath his horse's hooves had been repaved in the last several decades, and despite the wheel grooves being dug into the stones, still showed a broad, flat surface suitable for a caravan to pass a small company of horsemen, with peasants on foot ambling along the edges in safety. Where the road met the bridge, there was a sudden narrowing, as the bridge could let two wagons pass if neither was too broad and both kept as close to the edges as the nature of solid matter would allow. Already there was an argument up ahead where a wagon overburdened with hay had blocked the path for a near-empty wagon traveling the other way. Neither driver seemed ready to disentangle and back up first, to let the other pass.

"Perhaps we ought to sort the matter out," Zheru told Dasma, when they had come nearly to the bridge itself and the blockage had not yet been resolved. Other freight traffic had begun to stop up on either side, while elves on foot simply walked along the broad walls of the bridge.

"Perhaps," Dasma said, "but for the illegality of pitching these fools into the river."

"Which river is it?" Zheru recalled memorizing all manner of tributaries of the Istandaärtha under a tutor's instruction as a child, but could hardly put a specific name to the water he saw without seeing himself on a map from above, as if from an airship.

"Mer Nemola would know such things," Dasma said.

Mer Nemola was found instructing the mule drivers to take their wagons off to the side of the road, among the short line of trees there. Just as bridges were the property of the nobility or the emperor to repair as necessary and toll as they liked, the land immediately around them was given over to the same purpose. After so many fields of grains, the trees provided welcome relief with their green branches overhead and shade below. The ground was scoured of any grass or thorn-free shrubbery by the many beasts of burden who had stopped in the same place, and no doubt for similar reasons. 

"No rush today, in weather this fine," Mer Nemola said, when all the wagons were gathered off the road. He rubbed behind his artificial ear, considering the skyline. "Hot work, but no mud to make the roads slippery or snow to block the way. An hour here, and still to the night's stop before evening."

"Are all the stops planned?" Zheru asked. "We would think pressing on as the roads allow would make for faster travel."

"Ah," said Mer Nemola. "As caravan leader, you will be wanting to see the map."

Zheru had meant the comment as general encouragement, not a request to be more involved in the travel, yet all the same he ended up at the back of the lead wagon, where Mer Nemola laid down the tailgate as a sort of table. To this the man added a dispatch case, much like the ones couriers carried on their rounds. It required a key to unlock, and this key, Zheru noticed, was one smaller than the one for the wagon locks, and still carried by Mer Nemola himself. He found it a relief and disappointment both to not have been given all the responsibility of his nominal position.

"This case," Mer Nemola said, "holds maps for every route these wagons take to the west of the Istandaärtha. A man may keep all of this in his head, with experience, and yet still appreciate a reference."

"We are familiar with maps," Zheru said, leaning in to see.

What he saw was not the maps his tutors had set before him, nor the colored one that hung on the wall of his father's office. The map consisted of several sheets of thick paper, laid out across the tailgate in order like broadsheet pages tacked up in sequence outside a printshop. A thick line marched across the papers, cut into inch-long dashes and interspersed with a variety of symbols. Here and there a name had been marked over certain symbols. Below the dashed line, additional dashes sat beside yet more symbols Zheru could not identify. At the edge of each sheet of paper, a compass had been drawn with a direction marked: that, at least, was clear.

Zheru chewed on the corner of his lip, and glanced sidelong at Mer Nemola. The man waited for him in all apparent patience. No doubt answers were available if questions were asked.

Zheru did not _want_ to ask questions. He searched out a name he recognized, and considered the simple open triangle below it. Ezhlaro: a town of no great size, but his father had spoken of stopping in it during travel. And, there, the Csaärano, one of those tributaries he had memorized so long ago, marked with two parallel bars. "These are the towns," he said, "and these the rivers, along the way. A map needs no indication of direction when following a road, except when the road divides. Each sheet must take us to the next crossroads of any importance, and the compass shows which direction to take for the next step of the route. Except we are quite certain this name here is a river, and its symbol has changed from that of the others."

"A ford or ferry," Mer Nemola said. His ears flicked, an expression Zheru could not catch passing across his face. Perhaps the man was disappointed to find the maps so easy for a novice to interpret. Or perhaps he was pleased to not have been saddled with a complete fool? Either seemed as likely. "These dots mark tolls, for bridge or township. The more dots, the greater the fee." His finger moved above the paper to indicate what he spoke of, never touching the paper directly. "Here, an incline, up or down, serious enough to need brakes down or doubled teams up."

"The sections of the route line," Zheru said, "those are distance? Except the dashes below them must mean something as well."

"Each is a half day of travel in good weather," Mer Nemola said. "The extra marks below give us a measure for travel time in poor weather, when it will slow. Here, in the north, this symbol marks ice. See how the section with these incline marks has so many dashes below? A hill on an icy day can lead to disaster, if not taken with great care, whether up or down. And this square with the mark inside shows where one may overnight safely when slowed."

"It is all very clever," Zheru said, "but surely one could simply write out these directions, and more information beside. The exact tolls, if a bridge is prone to blockages such as these..." Over at the bridge in question, a military patrol had arrived, and some sergeant was bellowing out directions that would no doubt have all the traffic sorted in short order. "Dasma, have you packed us any writing materials? We could transcribe all of this."

"Not all those who might need the map can read," Mer Nemola said. He gathered his papers together again with great care, setting the ones for the route back in the lefthand side of the case. The papers in the other side of the case, bound together with soft ribbon, must have contained all the portions of the routes not awaiting them on this trip. "Nor would your brother wish for such information, acquired with experience and time, to be accessible to any merchant who cared to take the same routes."

Zheru flicked an ear, but smiled. "Certainly not," he said. "Our thanks for your assistance, Mer Nemola." He inclined his chin, and left at an easy pace to seek out Eikho, or lunch. Whichever could be more easily acquired.

Both, as it turned out. He sat beside Eikho in the driver's seat of her wagon, Dasma leaning against one of its great wheels, while they ate rolls stuffed with onions and cheese. A simple meal, and heavy in Zheru's stomach after several hours without breakfast. He checked his pocketwatch, and discovered noon had scarcely arrived.

"Does it please you," Eikho asked, "to know the hour and minute?"

"When we have appointments, yes. Here on the road..." Zheru tucked the pocketwatch away again. "Less so, though we confess our coat would feel unbalanced without a small weight of clockwork at our right hip."

"A heavy coat for this weather, Mer Shadoär." She had a coat of her own, a simple one of oiled canvas for protection against rain more than sun, and it lay on the seat beside her.

"The lightest of any substance our man was able to find. Though perhaps unnecessary now that we find ourself outside of the city, or the view of our usual companions." Zheru would have swept off his coat in turn, but for the difficult fastening on the cuffs. For all that it rather spoiled the moment, he climbed down from the seat to take Dasma's assistance in removing the garment. "There, now we are more suitable for travel."

"Your shirt will pick up all manner of dust," Dasma said. He offered it as a fact, and took the coat away to be packed with the rest of Zheru's luggage.

"Is Cetho full of goblins such as him?" Eikho asked, when Dasma was out of earshot. "See, we have asked a stupid question, and now you will think less of us."

"Not full of them," Zheru said, "though there are many, most of them a little each of goblin and elf, as he is. A man entirely goblin would have skin even darker than his, though his face is much like that of others. Do you have none on this side of the river?"

"Not so many," Eikho said, with a shrug. "Traders, yes, but not in all places. One hears all manner of things about Cetho."

"Have you never been there?"

"Why should we spend a day crossing a river, and at such cost? To find what over there?" She laughed, her bray carrying across the wagons. "Now you must think very little of us!"

"Not at all." Zheru hauled himself back up to the seat beside her, and pointed to a glossy brown bird perched on a branch above them. "Tell us of that bird, for we know nothing at all of it, and you have known its name and habits since childhood."

"Belike." Eikho looked up. "A cowbird, that. Nasty, clever creature. She lays her eggs in the nests of other birds while they're away, instead of building her own."

"You see," Zheru says, "we have both learned more already. An equitable sort of exchange."

#

Some hours later, Zheru blinked at the stretch of canvas overhead. The warmth of the day filled the narrow space where he lay, and for a long moment he could not recall where he was, or why.

Atop a layer of hay in the final wagon of the caravan. Yes, that. He had lain down for a moment's nap, waiting for the caravan to set out again, and...the caravan had set out again without waking him, by the rumble of the vehicle beneath him. Some jar of the wheel on the road had finally shaken him awake. He rolled onto his stomach, and reached for his watch to check it, only to realize it was still in the pocket of the coat he had sent away. Or stowed elsewhere in perfect safety, knowing Dasma.

He climbed down from the wagon. The mules kept up a steady pace, but not a fast one; he could lengthen his stride and walk up to where his horse was tied to the back of Mer Nemola's wagon, alongside the riding mule, without having to break into a trot himself.

"You should not have let us sleep so long," he told Dasma, when the man caught up with him.

"You will have greater responsibilities in the evening than the drivers," Dasma said. "Mer Nemola suggests that we ride ahead to the evening's stop, and arrange matters for the arrival. In the summer, travelers arriving near sunset may find all the best spaces taken already."

"Mer Nemola," Zheru said, "could suggest such a matter to us in person," but he said it under his breath, and mounted his gelding. He was not in such a bad temper as to make loud complaints about a man upon whose expertise the journey depended for the next several weeks. It would be impolitic at best, and at worst, the kind of wool-headed thinking his sisters would scold him for.

They rode together for half an hour in silence, leaving the caravan behind. Even a gelding as uninspiring as that one could outpace heavy wagons being hauled at a speed more sustainable than urgent. The road crossed a brook so small its bridge was barely more than a series of slabs laid over its banks, and Zheru paused there, letting his horse drop its head and drink. He found nothing of delight in the landscape about him; scrubby cattle grazed on scrubby grass, and the traffic passing was only simple farm trade. Wagons of hay, a woman carrying a goose under each stout arm.

"We feel that you disapprove of our recent conduct," Zheru said at last, "though we have been the soul of courtesy."

"You have," Dasma said.

"Despite this expedition being an absurd scheme of our mother and brother, we have been, in our estimation, quite reasonable. Rising at dawn, riding this terrible horse, all of it, Dasma. What have we done wrong?"

"You have done nothing wrong," Dasma said, watching his mule drink from the brook as if this were in fact the most compelling image available to him nearby.

Zheru leaned over, and poked Dasma in the shoulder with his knuckles. "I wish thou wouldst simply tell me," he said quietly. "Have I ever asked mute deference of thee?"

Dasma looked up at him at last. "You are being unfair," he said. "With all good intentions, we are certain, but you are unfair to Min Eikho, giving her your attention in this manner."

"One morning's conversation means very little," Zheru said.

"One morning does not. Will not, should it be only that. If you spend all your mornings and afternoons speaking with her, what will she expect? What will her fellows believe of her? She is unmarried, on the road, without relatives of any kind at hand to watch her."

"She scarcely needs chaperoning, at her age. We have not so much as implied any improper designs." Thought of a few, perhaps, in the course of the conversation, but those were the sorts of thoughts that never led to any action upon them. Not often. 

"No impropriety will be needed, Mer Shadoär," Dasma said crisply, "if you continue in this manner. You are not a young man in a coffee house, surrounded by petty nobility and the children of merchants. You are the second oldest living man in your house, at the head of a business venture, surrounded by employees. You _cannot_ intend to marry the woman--"

"We have scarcely met her!"

"--and so people may believe you use her affections otherwise."

Zheru's ears pinned back against his head. "We would _not_. It would be--unfair to her."

"And so," Dasma said, his voice softer than before, "you ought take care to divide your attention evenly among those employees and the business of the road, so that no one should believe otherwise."

"We ought to locate the evening's stop," Zheru said. "To neglect the task Mer Nemola has given us would surely be improper."

Dasma rubbed the bridge of his nose. "In the absence of your brother and mother, we offer the best advice we are able."

"We have always appreciated your advice," Zheru said, "however seldom we have followed it," and kicked his gelding into a trot back to the road.


	4. Chapter 4

The days of the journey stitched together one after another, not seamlessly, but like the fine mending Merrem Shadoäran's edocharo performed in daylight hours. Zheru could, if he thought back with care, remember that he had told the children a story about the Star's Child on a particular night, or that he had consulted with Mer Nemola on the maps on a particular day; but for the most part, all the events on the road joined into one long account he could not divide into individual moments. The sun's heat lay across all of the experience. Some afternoons he napped in the back of Eikho's wagon, and others Mer Nemola called a halt for the entire caravan, giving the beasts and drivers alike an hour's rest in the shade.

An hour, more or less. No one else seemed to carry a pocketwatch. Zheru set his to the time shown on a civic clock tower in what towns held them, and otherwise had little reason to look at its face. Ten minutes or twenty made no difference as the mules hauled onward.

He spent his mornings riding by Eikho, whether on his gelding or on the seat beside her, and the afternoons elsewhere in the caravan line. Dasma said nothing further to him on the topic; Mer Nemola said nothing on the matter at all. And if Eikho saw nothing wrong with it, why should anyone else? She was nearer his age than he had first guessed, but a woman fully grown either way, and she seemed to enjoy his company.

She asked him on one morning or another for the name of his gelding. Zheru had not given that a moment's thought before. "Clod," he said, "for being as fiery as mud."

Eikho laughed. "Poor thing," she said, "but we could not think of better."

"Do you spend much time thinking of names?"

"Always. Our mother has us name all the foals." She lifted her long-handled whip, and indicated each of the mules of her team in turn. "Weevil, Goldy, Prince, and Merrem Ginger."

"Goldy must be for his coat," Zheru said, "but now you must explain the other names to us, especially with titles such as those. Weevil, in truth?"

"We found her with her head buried in grain not meant for her at a precipitous age," Eikho said. "Prince, for the way he holds his ears. Such arrogance! Merrem Ginger, for she must be a merrem, having born a foal herself."

"Now we know you are teasing us," Zheru said. "We are well aware that mules cannot produce more in that manner."

Eikho made a gesture that was not warding, something like the one Zheru remembered from childhood games about lies and promises. "In _truth_ , Zheru, she has. The largest of the mules in Green Covez's team is her son."

"Merrem Ginger, then," Zheru said, and executed a bow from saddleback toward the mule so mentioned. "We must apologize to her for doubting her matronly nature and title. She must be the most illustrious mule of the Elflands."

"Nay, only of Thu-Evresar." Eizho jerked her chin towards Zheru. "Clod may need a moment alone, having been so insulted. Will he take no apology?"

"He is too proud to accept any apology, an we offered him one." Zheru took the invitation, climbing up to the seat beside her. It was only practical, with the shade of her canopy, and he told Dasma so, later that day. Which got him no response. The man became more closed-mouthed with every mile they traveled. Perhaps it was the effort of laundering Zheru's shirts of the road dust accumulation, with no proper laundry facilities or boiler for the purpose.

Zheru would have felt greater guilt for all this work if he had not already plumbed the dry depths of the improving literature in his luggage. Whatever instructions Dasma had received, the man had interpreted them without the slightest liberality. Principles of economics; a history of the western gold rush; a collection of essays on how transportation innovations and route changes had disrupted established trade patterns between principalities. The only use Zheru had for any of them was as a way of convincing himself to fall asleep while the summer evenings stretched later. He read in the long twilight until he could no longer make words out on the page, and fell asleep wishing for news from Cetho.

Thus, when the caravan drew up on the outskirts of Lohaiso for the night, he told Mer Nemola, by way of a courtesy, that he meant to go into the city.

"It cannot all close down before sunset," he told Dasma, as they picked their way through the uneven cobblestone paving of the outlying streets. The road into the center of the city was paved properly, being an official spur of the main interprovincial road maintained by crown funds; but as the caravan had no intention of entering the city proper, it had stopped well beyond that intersection. It was simpler to take the poorly maintained roads of the outskirts than backtrack so far.

Dasma considered the shoddy tenements they passed, with children squabbling in the doorways. "It is hardly Cetho."

"Nothing is Cetho except Cetho," Zheru said. "That is why anyone who is anyone lives there, unless they are someone by means of managing a territory elsewhere. All the same, it is a city, marked out on proper maps, and not some roadside village or wild town of the hills. Surely they will have a coffeeshop."

An hour of searching proved that Lohaiso possessed a small opera house, any number of teahouses, and a vigorous trade in food sold ready-made from wheeled stands in the streets, but not a coffeehouse of any kind. One teahouse owner opined that coffee was a wicked foreign beverage, and not to be trusted; a vendor of toasted bread and a pot of broth for communal dipping said she had never heard of the stuff; and an urchin outside a print shop suggested that only the wealthiest local families ever imported the beverage that far. "No call for it around here, Mer Stranger," he said brightly, trying to press a folded brochure into Zheru's hand. "Tea for waking, and beer for sleeping, as my mum always said. We know places for both, if you want."

Dasma took the brochure out of the child's hands, and then a quite familiar wallet from the boy's pockets. "Go," he said firmly, "before we report thee for theft."

The urchin scampered away, as unapologetic and cheerful as before. Dasma returned the wallet to his own pockets.

"Perhaps," Zheru said, "we could speak with one of the families our brother has dealt with before." He set his ears firmly upright, despite their tendency to droop. With all the wandering, he had consumed neither coffee nor supper, and had begun to want the latter as much as the former. "Though it would be terribly impolite to arrive so near dinner without warning, or formal introduction."

"Coffee would only keep you awake late into the night," Dasma said. "This city has nothing of interest for you, unless you wish to tour the factories."

"We can think of nothing we would like less." Zheru contemplated the street they had reached. In the center of the city, near the government buildings and old market square, the cobblestones gave way to thick interlocking tiles, and gave the place an air of being almost a proper city. All the same, the smell of the factories lingering everywhere. A city founded on smelting oil from the hills, and then later on turning that purified metal into practical objects, would never have the same charm as a city designed to support a vast governmental center and the emperor himself's primary residence. "There. A bookseller. We will be in there until they draw the grills, Dasma, so you may as well find yourself other entertainment for a moment. Perhaps see if a flitch of bacon can be procured, for a more exciting dinner tomorrow evening than filled bread from roadside bakeries yet _again_. We know there are cooking implements in that front wagon. We have seen them stored between the blankets and the buckets." 

Dasma moved a small number of coins from the wallet to Zheru's hands before leaving in search of bacon. Rather than argue over accounting with the man who kept his allowance from disappearing before the end of the month back home, Zheru drew in a fortifying breath, and went to see what the bookshops of Lohaiso might hold.

The one he entered was shabby, though not painfully so. It could afford to set a blazing light in the window even in the gray light of a late summer evening, and hung another light over the counter that waited between the bookseller's stock and her customers. The bookseller in question was a woman old enough to be Zheru's great-grandmother, if he still had such an illustrious ancestor still alive. She peered at him through thick spectacles as he entered.

"We would like," Zheru said, "a piece of literature that will set our mind on fire, and keep it in this state for days yet to come. If you should have several books of this nature, all the better."

The old woman was quiet for such a long moment than he had begun to believe she was deaf, or doddering, when she said at last, "Have you read the philosophy of Curnar?"

"No," Zheru said. "In truth, we have seldom found philosophy busy itself with setting anything on fire."

The bookseller burst into laughter at that, a long laugh that ended in coughing. "You were not reading what they said about his followers," she said, when the coughing stopped, "or you would not believe so. No philosophy, then. A less intellectual excitement. Novels, then? Brave soldiers on the windswept steppes, brave sailors on the stormswept seas. Or perhaps the young man's taste runs to poetry, as warm as the summer and as pretty as his face."

Zheru's left ear twitched. "We find that 'pretty' is for small children, or happy mothers," he said, "as 'beautiful' is for women of poetry. We are handsome, you are elegant, and so forth." He took a half step back, and offered her a bow of the sort courtiers used. "If one so much wiser than us will accept a small correction on the matter of modern usage."

"We have not been elegant in many years," said the bookseller, "though we will accept the correction all the same, from a pretty boy." She turned her back to him, and took up a cane from behind the counter to poke about through the inexpensive novels. "You want fiery excitement. _The Steppe Nomad's Winter Bride_? No, that one was published nearly ten years back, you would think it old-fashioned. _Three Spears Against The Wicked Maza_. A historical." Her chair proved to tilt when she leaned in it, far enough to let her pluck books from the shelf. " _Min Previn's Difficulties, Or, The Wicked Sister-In-Law_. A farcical adventure, quite new, not suitable for children. Nor is this one." A slim volume hit the top of the growing stack. " _To My Maddening Mer_ , a poetic epic by an anonymous Osmerrem, though one assumes her publishers know where to send her payment. Very popular of late."

"We are not seeking merely bedroom comedy," Zheru protested, though he did not push back any of the books she had set before him. "Perhaps one more, of an exciting yet edifying nature?"

"A treatise on the values of improving factory employment conditions?"

"We wonder at your definition of excitement, madame."

"The memoir of a naturalist traveling through Barizhan?"

"Tell us that they studied more than beetles and sparrows," Zheru said, "and we will accept it." He rested his elbows on the counter as the bookseller added up the total, along with a small local tax on all the novels. Presumably the city's mayor disapproved of such literature, or merely considered it a useful source of additional revenue that would draw minimal protest. "Any broadsheets with recent news?"

"Those they sell directly at the printshop, and only in the mornings. Come back tomorrow. Nothing of excitement will have happened between now and then, that you would be out of date, and if it does, well, what is there to do about it?"

Zheru bowed to the old woman again, and left with his twine-bound stack of books. She was entirely correct, which lowered his spirits immediately after they had been raised. Indeed, if anything of interest occurred back in Cetho, what could he do about it? Nothing, from on the road. And nothing of interest ever happened out there.

#

Lunch was still hours away, a few days out from Lohaiso, when the boy at Mer Nemola's wagon came jogging down the line to call Zheru forward. This was conveyed largely through tentative gestures; as messengers went, the boy was fond of neither speech nor any other form of communication.

Zheru left the novel he had been reading to Eikho beside her on the seat. "What he wants of me, I don't know," he said quietly.

"To consult with thee on important matters of leadership," Eikho said, and waved him on. "The mules and I can wait for the next chapter."

Zheru convinced Clod to break into a canter, though by the time he had managed that he needed to stop the gelding again to keep pace with the lead wagon. "Mer Nemola?" he said, with a polite nod to the man from saddleback.

"Mer Shadoär." Nearly ten days on the road, and they remained on a politely formal basis. This seemed unlikely to change in the immediate future. "A storm is coming, from the west."

The western horizon did have an accumulation of clouds, now that the man pointed this out, though none were more than the palest gray. Zheru was inclined to call them white, and ignore the matter. Then again, his house had not given command of caravans to Mer Nemola time and again without good reason. "So we see," Zheru said. "Ought we be concerned?"

Mer Nemola frowned, though at the horizon rather than the other elf. "Difficult to say, at this distance. It might yet pass over us before the downpour."

"And the wagons are guarded well against water."

"Against rain, yes," Mer Nemola said. "Against lightning or floods would be another matter."

Floods were another matter, and the road had been paralleling a small river since early morning. Zheru took his horse about to the other side of the wagon, and took a look at those near banks. "Does this road wash out often?"

"Every ten or twelve years, speaking of more than an inch."

"The wagons have wheels larger than some table tops. Three or four inches would barely disturb them."

"Water has a great force, when it surrounds you. Even shallow water."

Zheru stifled an impatient sigh. "Mer Nemola, we trust your experience and judgment on this matter, though we confess we do not see precisely what choices are available to us." He emphasized the plural pronoun at the end somewhat.

"In an hour's time, or less," Mer Nemola said, "we will cross this river and begin to climb. A gentle slope, which would take us out of any danger of flooding, and provide little hazard with the mud. If the storm falls atop us before then, we are in danger of flooding. If we seek high ground and wait, we lose only a little time, but put ourselves at greater risk of lightning strikes."

The air still tasted of dust and dry grass, and sun beating down on stone. Zheru drew in a deeper breath; there was no taste of incipient rain to it, not like the rainy days in Cetho when all the inhabitants slammed their shutters closed and waited out the dreariness inside. "When do you believe the storm will arrive?"

"Continuing north-west along this road, at this pace?" Mer Nemola leaned to the side and spit onto the dry road far below his wagon seat. "An hour, maybe more. Maybe less."

_Either he doesn't know what choice to make, or he doesn't want the responsibility of it._ Zheru frowned at the horizon himself, as if that would help him in any way. The clouds remained large, and largely white. _Be not that uncharitable. Or the responsibility is mine as caravan leader, however nominal, and he wishes to give me a choice to match the potential blame. Most likely all three at once, in various portions._

The land to the road's side of the river held neither fields nor much in the way of trees; it was scrubland, suitable for grazing if the animals were not kept in place overlong, and a fair distance from anywhere that might have suitable shelter for eight large wagons and all their mule teams. On the river's other bank began something like a woods, ambling distantly up the side of a low hill. There would be hills aplenty once they crossed the bridge, and trees around to draw away any lightning strikes.

His sister Amedro had attempted to explain lightning and its nature to him once, but he could no longer remember any of the scientific details, only that it sought out metal, and tall things. Just as well, then, that the caravan's wagons had none of the tin roofs used by certain carts in Cetho to ward off the rain.

Mer Nemola was still waiting on a decision from him.

"We can scarcely ask heavy wagons to do anything quickly," Zheru said. "We may as well continue toward the bridge, and watch for high ground along the way, in case the storm threatens more closely."

Having made such a pronouncement, he felt obliged to ride at the front of the caravan and study the monotonous scrubland himself. After several minutes of this, Dasma arrived with the book that had been left with Eikho, and packed it away with the rest of Zheru's luggage.

_If you are nothing but a few scattered drops of rain and a cool breeze,_ Zheru thought at the clouds ahead, _we will consider ourselves cheated of a morning's reading and conversation both by your impotent threats._

A wind curled down the road, kicking dust and fragments of dried grass against the wheels. Clod flicked an ear at the wind, and then sneezed, looking for an instant like nothing so much as an affronted matron stepping out into a blustery morning. Zheru patted his horse on the neck. "A little rain never hurt anyone," he said. "Live up to thy name, and ignore that."

Dasma rode up beside them. "We can think of various examples to the contrary, regarding rain," he said. "Your luggage is stowed and wrapped against water."

"Thunderstorms fall across us a two dozen times each summer," Zheru said. "We are not about to fear bright flashes in the distance now."

"Not from inside a sturdy house," Dasma said. "You may find it otherwise on the road."

Zheru was disinclined to agree when the rain began. It fell in soft, heavy drops, each one leaving a round mark where it struck the dry road. After so much sun the rain was a delight. And with his hair tied back in a traveling braid that would not have looked out of place on a child, there was not even disarray to be created by the water falling over him. It could scarcely do worse to his shirt and light coat than caravan laundry had done to them already.

The wind picked up, and snapped the hem of his coat behind him. "Perhaps," he said to Mer Nemola, "we ought to seek that higher ground now." Nothing that could be termed _high_ , precisely, had appeared since they began watching for such, but the ground crested up into a long mound not far from the road. The remnants of a very old wall, buried by the earth over time, or merely a chance wrinkle in the ground. "Though I would not expect a flood from any of this."

"Not a rising flood, no," Mer Nemola said, with a one-shouldered shrug for the other ways water might attack. He called his boy over, and sent the message down the line. "If ever you are caught in a flash flood, Mer Shadoär, point your feet downstream against any obstacles, and angle yourself toward solid ground. The water pushes too fast to fight across it directly."

"Have you ever been caught in a flash flood?"

"No," Mer Nemola said, "though we have helped retrieve a body from the debris of one afterward."

On that unsettling note, the man turned his team toward the mound, and Zheru went to see what assistance he could provide otherwise down the line.

The rain pounded down, increasing in intensity as steadily as the drums opening the first act of an opera. Atop the mound, the wagons gathered together into a muddy cluster, with the two children and the message boy shooed inside the lead wagon both for their safety and to keep them out of the way. There was no keeping any of the beasts out of the rain entirely, but by drawing the wagons near and stretching tarps overhead, the mule drivers could keep their teams from being entirely soaked.

The dry summer ground wicked up water like a cheap novel dropped into a puddle, and dissolved in a similar way. Mud spread even under the tarps, churned up by the hooves of almost three dozen pack animals. Moving out from under the tarps provided a deluge of falling water to wash the mud off, and then fling it back up from below in turn. Zheru found himself with muddy hands and soaking hair, his trousers spattered above the knee and his boots slowly filling with...he didn't know what, exactly, and did not want to know. He would call it mud, and be glad his edocharis was responsible for fixing _that_ problem once the rain stopped.

The rain did not stop. What had been a heavy downpour intensified, and the wind blew it sideways through the gaps between the wagons. Thunder boomed at what seemed a safe distance, several seconds after equally distant lightning lit the cloud-darkened morning.

"We begin to see your point," Zheru said to Dasma. Then he had to say it again, almost in the man's ear, to be properly understood. With the wind, rain, thunder, and the sound of so many mules (and a dozen people) inside a half-contained space, conversation did not come easily.

The lightning crackled its way toward them, then past. Bright though the flashes came, the thunder always followed the light, never accompanied it. As the space between that signal and response increased, Zheru found himself breathing more easily. (More easily, despite the growing smell of the mules doing what they usually did on the road or at picket, in the damp, body-heated space under the tarps.) Lightning could kill a grown man in one blow, and while he had never had reason to fear it before... Yes, his edocharis had been correct. Weather felt altogether different out in the country.

The pounding rain subsided, and the wind died, until they were only standing about in the mud and rain, not in a storm worth the name. Mer Nemola called for the tarps to be taken down, and mule teams harnessed up again, once several minutes had passed without thunder. The remaining drizzle kept the work muddy and uncomfortable. Zheru slipped twice merely trying to move out of the way of the mule drivers, and would have fallen the second time if Dasma had not caught him by the coat.

_Perhaps tonight we stop at an inn, and not merely a camping ground,_ Zheru thought, coaxing Clod out from amidst the other beasts. _One with a roof that does not smell of mules, and bedding that does not smell of mules, and a fire to dry all of us. Laundry facilities for Dasma. A goose and mushroom pie, without an onion in sight. A library full of novels, coffee brewing at its fire, and its tables covered with all the latest broadsheets from Cetho, brought this morning by airship, so long as thou art dreaming of the unlikely._

The gelding balked when he would have ridden it down the long side of the mound. An unusual move from a cooperative horse, but Clod's ears were pinned back, and it conveyed--much as a small child might--that it had no desire to leave the company of others like it, no matter what its master desired.

"You are no mule, to have an excuse for stubbornness," Zheru said, and gave the gelding its head. It ambled back towards the cluster of mules and mule-drivers atop the hill, where eight teams being set into harness again at once proved that every driver among them knew how to swear at mules and buckles alike. Eikho gave him a friendly nod, then returned to cinching a strap into place while calling Merrem Ginger words that would have gotten Zheru an appalled lecture from any of his childhood tutors.

He considered offering assistance, and rapidly thought better of it. The mule drivers knew their work; he did not. "A little distance for the animals who do real work," he told Clod, and thumped the gelding's sides with his heels.

His horse snorted, backed up a step, and then started down the hill.

And then Clod jolted down and sideways with a muddy snap. The horse screamed, and Zheru yelped, as the both of them pitched sideways to the ground. He moved his leg up, instinct or training from one of his long-ago riding classes, and slid down the side of the mound without being pinned by his own mount. 

Roots and rocks dragged him to a rapid halt. Zheru gasped for breath, more surprised than injured. His first thought was, _Now I am entirely covered with mud._

His second thought was for that idiot horse, and he scrambled to his feet. Others were already running his way, Dasma at the lead.

"We have hurt nothing but our pride and cleanliness," Zheru said shortly as Dasma arrived. "What about the horse?" Those who had followed Dasma stood about the animal, consulting in voices too low for him to hear over the rain.

"If it has not regained its footing by now," Dasma said, "we doubt it will. You may not wish to watch this."

Zheru wiped mud off his face with both hands. "We have not been a child for some years." He shouldered his way in between two mule drivers standing about his horse, in time to see Mer Nemola cut its throat.

"A broken leg," Mer Nemola said. "These fields are full of burrowers. The best mule can put a foot wrong about here, and there will be no saving it."

"Yes," Zheru said. "Certainly." The blood from the dead horse's neck washed down the slope with the rest of the mud. "Idiot creature. Better to lose that than one of the mules."

He walked back to the road to wait there, while the caravan was set in order. The road was damp, and a little slippery where mud had washed across stone, but easy enough to traverse. To his right, the river thrashed at its banks without overflowing them.

Dasma led the riding mule up to him, and offered him the reins.

"We would prefer to walk," Zheru said.

"After a fall such as that? We cannot assist you properly if you lie, Mer Shadoär."

Zheru blinked rapidly, glad for a moment of the rain. "Truly," he said, "we are not hurt. What takes the mule drivers so long?"

"Prayers," Dasma said.

"For a dead animal?"

His edocharis shrugged, one gesture for all the odd habits of people who worked with mules, and were religious besides. "We have funds enough to buy you another horse--"

"A waste of money. We would as soon as walk." Zheru drew in a breath that tasted of rain, and was glad he could not smell the blood anymore from where he was standing. "I wish," he said, "that I had never come." And how could Dasma answer that? It was unfair to say such things to him. "Lancathis will forgive me for losing one horse. If only those drivers would be done with their prayers, so that we might keep going. The rain is worse than the sun, and they are both worse than a proper city."


	5. Chapter 5

The caravan route crossed from one sheet of map to the next, and the world changed around it. 

On the map, it was simple: turn north to cross the river. (A northern direction marked on the drawn compass; the symbol for a bridge.) Proceed onward and upward. (More dashes than not showed the sign for an upward incline below them.) Stop at this campsite, this town, this farm road where fodder and bread can be acquired at good rates. (The map had no marking to indicate the exact prices, and Zheru wished again for a book of blank paper and a good pen, whatever Mer Nemola thought of such records.) Onward, until the next sheet of paper, and the final city. Dry and straightforward.

Dry, at least, was correct. The air grew sharper and dryer as hills swelled beneath the road, and the mules pulled slow and hard from one rest point to the next. Bare rock stared out of cliff sides near the road. The trees were twisted and rough things, clinging to the rock as often as they buried their roots in any real soil, and the bushes around campsites were filled with thorns. At noon, the sun scorched; at night, wind howled across the hillsides, and temperatures plunged.

Zheru learned to keep his coat nearby, and took to wearing a borrowed pair of gloves after gouging a vicious scratch across the heel of his palm. The scratch closed up rapidly, thanks to Dasma's foresight in packing along a pot of salve, but itched all the same beneath the gloves.

"They must call it the badlands with good reason," Zheru said to the man, during a morning's rest. The wagon wheels had all been chocked, even pulled off to the side of the road in a relatively flat stretch of land. One of them gave him shade to sit in, and a kind of privacy for the moment. "Why did anyone bother to stay here, before the gold rush?"

"People are inclined to stay in the places they know," Dasma said, "rather than risk the unknown." He passed Zheru a cup of water. "Or so we have heard, though we have never known anyone who resists leaving their home, given the opportunity."

Zheru snorted, but he took the cup and drank. There was always a faint ache in the back of his throat now. Not unlike the one in his heels, as he grew used to walking up hills beside the wagons. He was not about to ride Dasma's mule, however often the man offered. "Were you so eager for this chance to leave Cetho," he asked, passing the cup back, "when you learned of it?"

"We are here, are we not?"

"So you were as pleased as we were, but sensible enough not to let anyone know." Zheru tilted his head back to consider the shell of blue sky overhead. Not a shell at all, but some sort of effect of the sunlight passing through the tiny particles of the air... Well. He preferred the old stories, where the sky was the inside of an eggshell, to the confusing details of modern science. "Did you hear Lanan offer to teach us mule-driving? They are determined to make a caravaner of us."

Dasma packed the cup away into a bag. "Your brother does wish for you to learn the trade."

"More the numbers than the handling of reins, we expect. Besides, it is our mother who schemes in this manner. Our brother, with all respect, hasn't the wit to send us out on such short notice, or the strength of character to hold out against our objections. He did not inherit our mother's stubbornness."

"It seems to have fallen mostly upon her daughters," Dasma said.

"Goodness, Dasma. We cannot tell if you mean that as compliment or criticism for us." Zheru pulled himself back to his feet. "What do you think Lancathis would have done, had we dug in our heels and refused outright to take this journey?"

"We expect he would have given in," Dasma said, "and lectured you on the matter for the rest of the summer."

"A worse fate than travel," Zheru said, and tried to believe this.

#

Villages clustered near the road, interspersed and sometimes intermingled with military camps. Small patrols passed the caravan almost by the hour. For the first day or two Zheru found the frequent sound of jingling spurs and stamping boots unsettling as the patrols drew near; then it became one more piece of strangeness in the whole strange world of the badlands, no more worthy of notice than the village bakeries making bread from a different kind of flour than those of the lowlands.

The villagers, for their part, were cheerful about accepting money from the caravan, and disinclined to engage travelers on any level other than the financial. Children would run out from houses as the wagons passed to hawk baskets of bread, wide-brimmed hats against the sun, and polished copper earrings: all smiles and encouragement to consider their wares, and giving no response to the simplest polite questions about names, ages, or interests. Their lilting accents aspirated every word that opened with a vowel, and thrust the same breathy consonants in between any set of two or more vowels in a row. Zheru would have found being termed "Mer Shadohar" more charming if the villagers had been amiable on anything more than the surface.

"They're chary of being friendly with outsiders," Mer Nemola explained, when Zheru finally broached the topic. "Always have been, though they'll cluster near the roads for the safety of the patrols, and take coin from anyone passing through. You will find it quite different once we reach a city proper. Where men followed the gold rush, they brought their customs with them. The villages are made of those who kept away from that commerce and culture both."

Eikho put it rather differently, later that day. Zheru sat beside her in the driver's seat and read out loud about implausible adventures of mazei and soldiers from centuries ago. In a pause between chapters, they rolled past another village, and a pack of bright-eyed children sitting on a stone wall made small gestures against their passing.

"Superstitious brats," she said, not unkindly. "Well, how would they know better? Growing up out here, with little farms and little flocks. Belike I would make wards against travelers if I lived in a place barbarian-nibbled for centuries beyond memory."

"Nibbled," Zheru said, amused. "Thou hast the oddest turns of phrase, whenever we stop speaking of mules."

"Nibbled, indeed! Even the barbarians know not to kill the cows they milk, but they sneak in to steal the milk and flour, or leave foundlings behind. Thou wilt know the changeling children by their long teeth, or their blue skin."

"Blue like the sky, I'm certain. Thou'rt teasing me again."

"No, blue like ice beneath the sky, in the deep of winter," Eikho said, quite seriously. "Or like the blue of milk with all the cream taken out, in their children. The first time I saw a girl with the gray skin of there being a goblin among her great-grandparents, I thought she had come down from the steppes."

Zheru twisted about in the seat to look back at the children on the wall; they were all the white of ordinary milk, exactly the same as Eikho or himself. "Perhaps they are merely cold," he said, "from living so far north. Anyone might turn blue living in nights like these."

Eikho laughed, and the mules pulled onward, up through the hills.

#

The caravan reached a bridge without a river. Two rough gravel roads met up with the stone of the imperial road, about half a mile before a bridge spanning a deep ravine. It was, according to the chatter from other wagons gathering into a ragged queue, the only bridge across the ravine for miles in either direction, and a common choke-point for traffic. An old woman with a pair of goats on a tether regaled everyone in earshot with stories of how the barbarians used to sweep in from the west to exactly this point, cross the ravine, sack all the villages to the south, then destroy the bridge after crossing it again to cut off any pursuit.

Zheru would have gladly listened to her stories at some length, but Mer Nemola was putting serious work into keeping the caravan in line. There was no dawdling behind to listen without becoming separated from the wagons entirely. "Every time," Mer Nemola muttered, standing up in his seat to look toward the bridge, "we spend half the day at this crossing, which ought to take under an hour. If it were managed properly!"

"Perhaps we should add a note to the maps," Zheru said. The man's ears twitched. "...we will just go see if anyone ahead has an estimate."

The line was roughly single file, leading up to the bridge proper, but no one argued at Zheru ambling past it on foot. The other pedestrians were taking the opportunity to chat with their neighbors, while those on mounts or wagons were giving their beasts a moment to rest. The leisurely approach revealed itself as only sensible once Zheru reached the front of the line, and found a squad of soldiers with a beam resting over the walls of the bridge. Two soldiers were questioning each person who approached the front of the line in turn, and consulting a handful of documents. A solitary lieutenant, mounted on horseback and looking bored half unto death, watched over the process.

Zheru stopped at a polite distance from the lieutenant. The officers's horse was a tall bay with flashy white markings, suitable to grace a hunter's stall in many an expensive stable. The officer himself wore a uniform dyed to a perfectly even dark red, black trim and gold embroidery picking out the details of the coat. He was ten years older than Zheru, with a glossy soldier's topknot and the bearing of a man who had done this sort of work many times, and would do it well no matter how tedious he found the entire process.

For several seconds, Zheru contemplated joining the army, and becoming exactly that sort of man. Though there was always the chance of having to fight actual barbarians, or go to war, or simply be posted somewhere like this bridge... No, it wasn't worth the risk, however fine he might look in a similar position.

The lieutenant's gaze fell on Zheru; he had pale blue eyes, reminding Zheru of what Eikho had said about the barbarians. Though on an elf, to be certain, and it was an ordinary color for eyes when it would've been strange for skin. "Questions, Mer?" The man's voice had what Zheru was accustomed to think of as no accent, which was to say, the accent of one who spoke like the people of Cetho.

"No," Zheru said, with a shadow of a bow to the man, "only commiseration. We see you will be questioning goats and geese all day, at this rate."

The corners of the lieutenant's mouth turned upward slightly. "Have you brought many more? One question per goose, two per goat."

"We shall be forced to disappoint you, sir. Nothing but silk bolts, and the mules to pull them. Unless you have more questions for the mules? They are the most polite creatures we have ever seen on four feet, but not the most articulate."

"Silk bolts?" The lieutenant leaned his way. "Dyed already?"

"In a dozen colors or more, with half a wagon of embroidery thread besides. We heard that Coïzhiro has acquired an opera house, and so there will be need of silk for the singers and the listeners alike."

"Hardly an opera house worth the name," the officer said, with a dismissive flick of his hand, "yet one may find _some_ culture hereabouts. We suppose you will be arriving in Coïzhiro in, what, two days?"

"Two by the maps," Zheru said. "Three, at the rate this line moves, mules being less inclined to increase their pace than horses are. We are told this makes them clever, but in truth, we prefer horses and speed, given the opportunity."

Not long after this, he returned to the caravan, and followed it back up the road in its slow grind to the front of the bridge. When the soldiers asked, he had the names of each person in the caravan to give them, and could show them the documents from the exchange of bolts and bank stamps. The soldiers had a single wagon unlocked to peer inside before waving the entire caravan along.

"Do they always have these questions?" Zheru asked Mer Nemola, when they had crossed the bridge. "With no toll or tax, we cannot see the reason for them."

"They seek smugglers, or thieves," Mer Nemola said, "and unload half the wagons to seek whatever they are most minded to care about on that day." He rubbed a hand behind his artificial ear, considering Zheru from atop the high wagon seat. "Quicker than usual, today."

"They seemed reasonable enough," Zheru said. "Especially for those with the right papers."

"We always have the correct papers," Mer Nemola said.

"Then they must be in a hurry themselves, today," Zheru said, and wandered away from the lead wagon to find Dasma, who was holding the novel for him.

#

The late summer evening had streaked the horizon red, then faded down to gray, by the time the caravan settled into camp for the night. Mer Nemola spent several minutes arguing with a man of the town over the matter, to no avail; they were allotted space in a dry corral for the mules, and a stretch of land beside a chest-high wall for the wagons, but neither forage nor rooms were available. It was not a matter of crowding, Mer Nemola told them, when he returned to those awaiting the verdict, but of village politics. The man who they arranged forage rights with on each pass through the area had fallen out with his sister-in-law, and now their usual camp location was unavailable.

"Everyone in these little villages is related to everyone else," Eikho told Zheru, as they hooked feed-bags in place for the mule teams. With the corral covered in nothing but hoof-churned dirt, the grain had to be fed directly; she had explained the digestive results of ground-feeding grain in rather unpleasant detail a week ago. "So they spend all their time fighting with each other, like a family holiday, and never do more than scrape a living from the hillside. I could never live so."

"Not at all like mule breeders," Zheru said solemnly. He had the knack of putting the feed bags in place by now, though it was no great difficulty with the mules. They were clever enough to comply with a process that would give them what they wanted in the end. Quite unlike some strong-blooded hunters, in his experience.

"That is entirely unalike," Eikho said, with a laugh. "We spread out, rather than huddling up so close, and give ourselves breathing space. Besides, we travel. When I am married with a child on my hip, then I may settle down at my mother's ranch to study bloodlines and trim hooves, but for now I see the length and breadth of the Elflands."

"The length and breadth west of the Istandaärtha."

"Who would ferry mule-teams across, rather than hiring wagons on the other side?" She leaned back against a wooden post for a moment, elbows on the split rails, and lifted her chin toward the eastern horizon. "It may as well be another world."

"I assure thee, it is as much a part of the empire as this."

"When the bridge is built," Eikho said, "I will travel to Cetho once, to say that I have. On a day when I might see the emperor. That, I would like to do. Have you ever seen him?"

"Once," Zheru said, "at a distance." His Serenity had been a narrow gray figure with shockingly black hair, solemn in all that glowing imperial white. Like the silver hand of a clock against its white face, pointing out the time.

"I should like to see him," Eikho said. "Yes, and his empress. That would be worth the trip."

Zheru leaned against the next post down, watching the same sky she did. "And further east, afterward?"

"To compete with the mule-drivers who learned the eastern roads when they were children?" Eikho laughed. He still liked the sound, though it sounded no less akin to a donkey's bray than it had the first time. "What ambition thou ascribest to me! Wilt thou travel to the east, after this, and then the south, to see all thy family's caravans and ships to their destinations?"

"I have no taste for the sea. The constant toss of the decks beneath one's feet, the dry food, the salt spray sticking clothes against the skin, the storms... My father used to tell me stories." Years gone, when the man had been alive, and not an increasingly distant memory. It was easier to remember the portrait of Antheä Shadoär hanging in the hall than his living face. Zheru pushed away from the railing. "I shall have to see what my mother decides. Ah, I do miss coffee some nights. When thy day in Cetho arrives, I must take you to a coffee house."

"Belike," Eikho said lightly, which meant _I think not_ in that tone.

Zheru left the corral for the company of the wagons. There, he found cold bread from the morning's bakery and cold water from the village well. Dasma offered him a coat, and Zheru pulled it on without complaining, though the evening was still warm. The wind was picking up, and in half an hour he'd be glad for the protection against the cold.

He would never have worn the coat out into the streets of Cetho, even at night. Even Dasma's tailor-trained hands could only do so much to repair the gouges thorns had made, or to wash out stains from mud and dust on the road. "Tell us," he said to Dasma, "that you have saved one good coat for Coïzhiro, and a clean shirt to wear beneath it."

"Clean enough for lamplight," Dasma said, "if no one looks closely at the hems."

"As if we should be so lucky as to have anyone in that city intimately concerned with our shirt hems!" Zheru let the man button up his coat against the future wind. "Do you know what the opera house is playing there now?"

"We have no idea, Mer Shadoär."

"It is the opera, whatever the exact story might be," Zheru said. "Entirely proper, and as we are assured no one has imported coffee this far, we may as well find _some_ entertainment in the place. Especially as certain other amusements have been forbidden to us."

"You are an adult," Dasma said quietly. "Not forbidden, but advised against."

"Comes to the same thing," Zheru said. He walked away from the caravan, feeling unbearably childish, or as if he was being treated like one. Perhaps those two views also came to the same thing. He did not want a nursemaid any longer, only--well, a friend, or at least a friendly servant who gave more amiable comments than critical ones.

There was no reason to go far. There was nowhere to _go_ , save back down the road, unless he wanted to walk through a petty village full of private villagers. The most interesting feature of the village was an old watchtower, no longer staffed with watchers. Zheru walked alongside the stone wall the caravan was using as windbreak until it ended, and sat at the end of it. The stars were slipping into view as the grey-gold sky sank into blackness.

In Cetho, he would be leaving the house at this hour. At a friend's hunting lodge, sitting in a bright room with furs and wine and good company. He drew in a breath of cold road dust, and tried to feel like the responsible scion of a respectable merchant house, doing his part for the family trade.

It didn't work. But he had, for a few moments, given it an effort. That had to count for something.

When he gave up on watching the stars, the caravan was still a quiet rumble of elven and animal sound at his back. The village had few lamps lit in any of its buildings, and no people out on the road. Nothing like a city in the slightest. One might think the two places were built by entirely different creatures, that they could be so different in the twilight. A lone figure on horseback came across the field beyond the wall at a brisk trot, some farmer finally reaching their home.

Except, Zheru realized, no farmer would ride that mount. It was no plowhorse, but a tidy riding horse, compact with clean lines, and kitted out with saddle and tack suitable for long travel. Its rider had skin as white as his own, a bright smudge in the evening shade, and hair as black as Dasma's. He would have thought the pair a mounted soldier on approach, except for the gray and black of the rider's outfit being no sort of uniform. More than that, the rider was a woman, tall as a man and with her shoulders set like a soldier might.

He dropped his feet back to the ground. The woman was approaching at no more than a trot, and had no companions, so he could scarcely be afraid of some theoretical attack, but he did not much want to meet her while sitting, either. And for a moment, he thought she would ride past him, onward into the west and the night, without ever looking his way.

But she reined her horse to a halt beside him, and looked down. "Qualis bellus puer, hic foris abstans solus," she said. It was a muddle of words that sounded almost like the ones he knew, and words that he could make no sense of at all.

"We beg your pardon," he said, "but we do not know your language."

The rider smiled, showing long, sharp canines. "Num a familia huius pagi es? Tanto melius, puto."

On the far side of the village, someone cried out. The last thing Zheru saw was the glint of metal on the woman's fist, as it swung towards him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the matter of the language of the people of the Evressai steppes, we hit an interesting tangle. On the one hand, their language is clearly related to that of the elves in some manner: see the discussion of etymology in the book for proof. On the other hand, it seems quite likely that their language is sufficiently distinct as to not be mutually intelligible.
> 
> When it comes to representing this language in dialogue, from the perspective of a character who cannot understand it, I felt there were two obvious choices: attempt to construct an entire language structure following the few forms/phonetics we have available in the book and write dialogue in that; or simply render it as "the barbarian said something Zheru couldn't understand" time and again. Not liking either approach, I have instead gone for the slightly odd approach of translating these lines into Latin.
> 
> This has four benefits: it gives most English-speaking readers a similar sense to that Zheru gets, of recognizing familiar roots and occasional words but not understanding the whole; it lets me record exactly what I know the speaker is saying, for my own future reference; it shows the length, punctuation, and general flow appropriate to what was actually said; and it keeps me entertained. These seemed reasons enough to go with this approach, and it's still less work than trying to build my own conlang for the people.


	6. Chapter 6

The world smelled of horses and sweat and wool, and Zheru couldn't think of why. He meant to close his eyes again; when he tried, he found he hadn't opened them yet. _Simpler,_ he thought, and didn't finish that sentence even in his head.

#

The world was made of dizziness and a steady, faint thudding. Hoofbeats, he decided, or something akin to them. Like the drums at the opera representing troops marching to battle, while the shadow soldiers bobbed along the screen, and soon there would a dramatic duel-song. Or perhaps an aria, if it was one of those stories that focused on the women at home, and not the men at battle.

He had never been so uncomfortable at an opera before. Perhaps he was drunk? He tried to figure out who the singer was, or what story he had come to watch, but all he could hear was the drums, and a distant babble of low speech. Someone in the next box refused to be quiet, and he had half a mind to open his eyes and go deal with them. If only his head didn't hurt so much. It wasn't worth the bother after all.

#

Something smacked him in the back, and he woke up.

The sky above was black as goblin hair and spread with stars, from the brightest guide-stars of the night to the long spread of the Milk River, where too many stars to count, too faint to be distinguished from each other, painted a band from horizon to horizon. He blinked up at all of it, and then rolled his head to the side. So he was lying on the ground? That explained why he ached, having fallen...somewhere. In some manner. The back of his head throbbed fiercely.

"Vigilat?" The voice was entirely unfamiliar to him, from the words to the accent.

_Baritone,_ Zheru thought, _so that can't be the hero, unless I've chosen a tragedy._ He blinked again at the darkness of the world that wasn't the sky. Grass, as best his eyes could make out, the high yellow grass that grew alongside the road in flat stretches. There was nothing operatic about the place, nor could he remember why he had woken with opera on the mind. Nothing made sense, except the ache in his back.

"Vigilat. Hoc mihi tene." That voice was more familiar, though he couldn't place it. Some woman of the villages, if she had decided to speak unintelligibly. A white face appeared in front of him when he tried to look up again. Pale in the darkness, like any elf, except for the dark hair.

Zheru spit out half a syllable of a cry for help before her hand covered his mouth. She wore leather gloves, and he could scarcely breathe through the pressure across his mouth and fingers pressed up beneath his nose. "Aspice, vigilat." She kneeled on his hips, a solid weight, and held his right wrist flat against the ground. "Usque ad me ambulavit, agnus miser. Funem mihi affer."

"Nec labore nec insectatione dignus est," said the baritone voice, some kind of complaint. There was a general shuffling behind the woman that Zheru couldn't see, at least two more people, and horses as well.

"Minimus labor," the woman said, as unconcerned as Eikho was when speaking of bridge tolls or a stop for lunch.

Zheru tried to pull out from under her, and suddenly the hand on his wrist turned into a thumb digging between the bones there, a sharp pain that had him gasping against her hand. He didn't even know what to do with his free hand. Try to hit her? That would do as much good as any time he'd flailed against his older sisters, when they decided to dangle him from a bannister or wrap him up in sheets.

"Quietus fi, et non dolebis," the barbarian woman said, this statement directed at him. He stopped his struggle, and the pain in his wrist eased. "Aspice, satis prudens est. Hoc non tam diu esset, si illum funem mihi afferas. Totum noctem equus eum non feret."

A man stepped forward to pass something to the woman, who took her hand from Zheru's mouth. She pulled his hands together, and bound his wrists with a leather strap before he had quite worked out what she was doing. A metal clasp snapped shut on the cord directly below his wrists.

The barbarian woman hauled him to his feet, and looked him over with some kind of interest. He couldn't make out many details of her face in the night, though it was clear now that she stood a few inches taller than he did.

"We are--" Zheru hiccuped quiet when she lifted her hand, and then tried again in a lower voice. "We are of the Shadoäda, a very wealthy family, and they will surely ransom us. You will be rewarded if you treat us well, whatever grievances you may have against...whoever you may have them against." He wondered how far away Dasma was, and if the man had thought to alert soldiers before following. Yes. Certainly, Dasma would think of such things. The man was no fool, unlike some of the people he served.

The woman walked away, the length of leather strap held loosely in one hand. A few feet of distance, and then she tugged at the strap when it stretched between them. "Veni," she said.

Zheru looked back over his shoulder. He could make out nothing but the sky bending down towards a curve of hills, and grass in every direction. "Please--"

She turned around, sighed faintly, and slapped him across the mouth. And while he was still stunned by the--the way he had never expected any such a motion, none of this at all, she pressed two fingers against his mouth.

"Tace," she said. "Nunc veni."

He followed her to the horses, where she vaulted onto the back of that same compact beast he'd seen her on before. A single graceful motion, as if she were only walking up the step of a staircase. She fastened her end of the leather cord to a loop on her saddle. Around her, four figures of pale face and dark hair waited, already mounted as well.

Zheru ran his tongue over the corner of his mouth, and tasted blood there.

When the horses broke into a trot, the leather at his wrists pulled, and he followed.

#

The barbarians rode for hours. He had no way of counting the time, and he lost track of counting his own steps after the second or third time he stumbled. He fell, once, and was dragged for a yard by the horse, until the woman stopped it and waited for him to stand up again.

He stood up. He followed. There was no choice to it. There _was_ a choice to it, when he tried to think it through, but not a real choice. Let himself be dragged, and see if they cut him free? No. Once was more than enough. Shout into the night in hopes of some rescuer just past the curve of a hill? And what if there was no one?

There was no one. They passed no houses that he could see, no tiered fields, no candlelit windows or blazing watchtowers. He put one foot in front of another, half blind in the moonless night, and told himself that made it better. There was no cowardice in not making useless choices, was there? Like the advice Mer Nemola gave about being caught in flash floods. _Pull yourself from the river first, and save others after you have a solid place to stand and an anchor to it. Otherwise, you both drown._

When the horses stopped, he nearly walked into one. The motion had become an automatic process, without thought behind it. He jerked to a halt, and stood there, shivering, while the barbarians spoke together in low voices. They sounded impossibly foreign, and yet impossibly mundane. A group of friends chatting idly about their evening plans, in a language he had never heard before that night.

The ground sloped up to his left and right, then folded away up ahead, forming a niche in the land big enough to hold all of them and their horses, but not much more. The space was too gently sloped to be called a ravine, and too narrow to be called a valley. Grass grew in thick clumps around stones that had rolled all the way to this lowest point from a rock cliff face high up the side of the hill. Here the barbarians dismounted, setting up a primitive camp: blankets on the ground, horses on two lines, all the saddles and baggage lumped together into the center. The woman who had charge of him simply tied the end of the leather strap to the belt she wore, to keep him close and give herself both hands free as she unsaddled her horse.

One man walked a distance away to stand watch. From the back, he was a featureless shape, black hair and gray cloth blending together in the darkness. Starlight glinted, once, off a blade in his hands.

It seemed odder than the drawn blade, when Zheru realized the man was doing nothing more dramatic than trimming his fingernails. A thoroughly mundane act amidst an incomprehensible night.

The barbarian woman sat down on a blanket, and wound the strap down until Zheru had to sit on the ground beside. It felt worse than standing, not relief; he had to think about where to put his legs, and all the exhausting terror of the hours spent walking sank into him at once. He was shivering again, despite his coat, as much from fatigue as the cold.

"Agnus miser," the woman said. She leaned back to take a folded cloth from the pile of supplies: a saddle pad, still smelling intensely of horse. This she tossed over him, and without further conversation, she lay down to sleep.

Zheru curled up on his side, in the dirt, pulling the cloth over what of him it would cover. The walls of earth around them cut out most of the wind; it rustled through the tall grass up on the top of the hills, as if people were rushing toward them. Always approaching, never arriving. It was only the wind. As unhelpful as the rough ground beneath him.

He did not expect to fall sleep, and did anyway.

#

Dawn was still a gray smudge on one side of the sky when strong hands hauled Zheru out of sleep. Not to his feet, but far enough for his hands to be unbound, and then his coat pulled off him. He blinked away the muzziness of too little sleep to find three of the barbarians clustered around him, eyeing him rather as he might an unusually patterned horse at market.

There was an argument at hand, rapid but not heated. The woman who had taken him stood behind him with a hand to the back of his neck, making her points with a decisive voice. Two of the others argued against her, and one equivocated. The fifth barbarian he couldn't see. Standing watch, perhaps, as any sensible raiders would have one of their number do.

They came to some sort of agreement, which involved going through the pockets of the coat they had taken from him. Zheru sat quietly as his pocketwatch was opened, inspected, and passed to one of the men. _Having been stolen, of course I would then be robbed._ He curled his hands tightly across his knees, and affected not to care. It was only a bit of clockwork. Quite replaceable. He could buy another, newer and otherwise identical, when--

There was a _when_ in the future where he would be away from the barbarians. Zheru decided to believe that, as firmly as he believed all other matters he had no solid evidence for. The existence of cities he had never visited, the turn of the world making the stars move in the sky rather than the reverse, the source of the Istandaärtha. Such things existed and were true whether or not he could grasp them. Very well: let other things be true, to please him as well as matters of geography or science had ever pleased his sisters.

He had not realized how tightly his ears were pinned against his skull until the woman behind him pulled one out at an angle, and began working the earrings out. Her hands were as efficient as Dasma's at the task, if much rougher.

No matter. The earrings were as replaceable as the watch, and less expensive. Nothing more than glass beads and copper, the kind one could purchase at open stalls in the market. All his best jewelry remained at home, locked away safely, and his third-best, perhaps, in Dasma's care. He let his ears be handled without protest, holding them at an ordinary angle as if he were simply...waiting. For the barbarians to be finished. Not upset in the slightest.

She took the key from beneath his shirt, holding it up on its cord, and for a moment Zheru couldn't remember where it was from. It had become a part of his clothing for the last few weeks, worth as little thought as the laces of his boots or the buttons of his shirt. Something Dasma kept watch over.

"If you wanted to rob the caravan," he said, and was surprised at the reediness of his own voice, "you should have found that miles back."

They ignored his words entirely. "Doctus est?" asked one of the men. "Agricola plus usui esset."

"Non doctus," said the woman, tossing the key to that man. "Claves suas extra et genere aliter gestant." She leaned over Zheru's shoulder, and took his hands to begin divesting them of rings.

It was all _worthless_. Nothing but traveling jewelry, as inexpensive as the earrings, and more worn. Zheru spread his fingers flat rather than fight her quick motions, and saw those few rings parceled out among the barbarians. They were nearly out of items to rob him of, and he wondered where they would _stop_. Leave him naked and alone in the wilderness, or cut him into pieces at the end?

They didn't eat people. Not even barbarians. His childhood tutors had assured him of that, when his sisters had teased him into tears yet again over distant goblin and barbarian threats. At some point, they would be done.

The woman pulled at his signet ring, and Zheru made a fist of his hand. "You don't even read," he said. "It's not even _worth_ anything to anyone but us, why _would_ you," and he tried to bite her when she slapped him. He couldn't even get to his feet, flat on his back in an instant when she simply pulled him down by his own braids, but he snarled at her like a dog-cornered cat.

She laid a knife to his throat.

"Manu aperi, agnule," she said. This needed no translation. He spread his hand open, and let her take the signet ring away.

Even that could be replaced. The mark was the same for anyone of the house, being only merchants and not nobility. A new ring could be cast from the same impression that had been used for his mother's ring, his father's, his brother's, and it wasn't as if his father had been home to present that one, in any case. None of it _mattered_. If he said that to himself often enough, it would feel true again.

"Labor fiet," said the fifth barbarian, from out by the horses. A woman by the voice, though Zheru had taken her for a fourth man before.

"Cave res tuas," said the woman with the knife. The barbarian that seemed to be his, or the other way around, while the others gave their opinions on the matter. She put the knife away, and left him lying on the ground. There was nothing left to take.

Zheru picked himself up. When he stood, the others glanced his way, and nothing more. They were busy with gathering up all the gear from the few hours of camp they'd made: saddles back on horses, blankets rolled, luggage stowed. They moved efficiently, but without any particular rush; if there might be soldiers in pursuit, the barbarians weren't concerned about that yet.

The barbarians were more distinct in the growing light of dawn, and no longer a general mass of pale faces and dark hair. It was exactly as he had been told: all of them had pale blue skin, as if a painter had set out to depict them in the elvish white, and let a single drop of blue fall into the mix. They wore their hair to their shoulders or a little below, bound loosely in two or three chunks, and that had a drop of blue to what might otherwise be a goblin black. Their ears were a little stockier than elvish ones, their canine teeth much longer and sharper, but otherwise they seemed built along similar lines. Merely barbarians, not the trolls of stories.

He stared at them shamelessly, as they paid him no mind, and tried to pick them out as individuals. Two women: one taller than him and built as sturdily as any mule driver, with high cheekbones and a square jaw; the other more lightly built, quiet, most often apart from the rest of the group. The three men he divided into two sets: two were broad-shouldered brothers as similar in face as the cousins among the caravan, argumentative and cheerful; the third was the more handsome of the set, and more solicitous of the first woman, who was, by all evidence, either the leader of the group or desirous of the position.

No doubt any one of them could cut his throat and leave him lying in the grass, if so inclined.

The barbarians drank from waterskins as they packed up, and ate small rounds of a crumbling cheese. When they had finished, the woman gave Zheru a waterskin; she waited for him to have two long swallows before taking it back. She bound his wrists together again in the same way that she packed the waterskin into place with her horse's other baggage. He was, after all, only another piece of baggage, to be tied down properly and brought along.

When the horses moved, he followed.

#

The sun rose higher, and the horses trotted onward, following the curve of the narrow valley until it fell away on both sides. There was no clear demarcation between the badlands and the Evressai steppes, though Zheru felt certain the flatter land must be the beginning of the latter. They were heading due west, judging by the sun and the shadows it cast before them. The heat at his back grew, and the wind stilled, until they moved through stifling hot air, the grass unmoved except where they walked through it.

He put one foot in front of another, and tried to picture it as a map. To the east, at his back, would be the long imperial road climbing through the badlands: directly north and south, except where it curved around the worst parts of the hills. His journey was a line like the ones tutors drew on cheap maps to show the movements of armies and emperors in the history lessons. Due west. Follow it back east, and he would hit the road eventually, given energy and water and freedom to walk that far without...the many things that might happen to an elf alone in this place. There were hunting cats somewhere out there, and bears, even aside from what damage barbarians and thirst could do to a man.

The idea tumbled about in his mind. Due east, toward the road, for as long as he could walk. He couldn't know the path they had taken in the night, while he was draped across a horse, or following in darkness. Due east might take him to a ravine with no indication of which direction would find him a crossing and which would send him hiking around it for miles, but all obstacles could be circumnavigated eventually. Somehow. East, back toward civilization and cities and soldiers, or even farming villages where people spoke a proper language, however heavily accented.

His family would retrieve him, if they could find him. That he could be certain of. It was where his thoughts fell while he was trying to picture his own movement across a map laid on a table. He didn't remember what other powers laid claim to the Evressai steppes, if any, or which bordered them. Pencharn? Or did that only border the empire further south on the western edge, and bend away before the steppes?

_Perhaps if I had paid more attention to my tutors, I would know exactly how hopeless this is,_ he thought. One foot in front of another. _Mother should have hired us tutors on matters of escaping bonds, instead of history. I would have found that useful as a child and again now. Or I should have entered a university, in pursuit of some career, and left some other man entirely to be in the position I am now. A theoretical different man might be better prepared for such an eventuality._

He was not a geographer or a naturalist, and all the hunting he had done with friends had taken place within a day of Cetho itself. Still. He could remember _east_ , and the maps of the Elflands as a whole. Travel east far enough from the steppes, and eventually reach the road.

There were, in theory, roads into the steppes, built for the sake of the army. Those might go anywhere, or stop suddenly, or lead to impassible points where bridges had been torn down in the last war. But east would take him home. Somehow.

He traveled west, and wondered if this was an early sally of a new war with the barbarians, or simply one of the activities described as "unrest" in the newspapers, when there was any mention of such things at all. Would a newspaper in Cetho print news of his disappearance? No, not his, though maybe his brother's, if that had happened. He was no one of note. All the notice was for his family, who would want to be quiet about retrieving him if they could. Never let the sellers or the buyers know of your trouble moving goods from one location to another, or they might not sign the next contract.

It had been somewhat less than a full day. His family wouldn't even know he was missing, yet. It should have been a terrible thought, and instead he took an odd kind of comfort in it. They could imagine him learning about the workings of caravans and the monotony of trade for a while longer. If the ground had been rather more even, and the pace of the horses steadier, he might have closed his eyes and tried to imagine the same.

_Well,_ he thought, _they did want me to travel, and told me I would learn from the journey. I had no desire to travel, and said I would dislike the entire process. So we have all been proven thoroughly right._

They stopped once in the early afternoon by a stand of twisted trees, which grew beside a near-invisible stream cutting a rocky path between the grass. He was given a handful of the crumbling cheese, and as much freedom to wander as the horses at their forage, while the barbarians napped or chatted in the tree's shade. Zheru did not mistake it for any sort of opportunity. Nor was it an opportunity when the barbarians split into two groups, the brothers and smaller women canting away towards the south-west while Zheru was tugged along with the other two toward the north-west. There was no more chance of him defeating two barbarians, or escaping them in the sunlight, than there had been with five.

At night, he decided, it might be another matter. Depending on how they bound him, and how they secured their horses, and who stood watch in what way, and...too many different variables than he cared to think about before discovering their nature. The memory of a knife blade across his throat made him shiver in the sun, and stumble on the end of his tether. Days of ambling beside the wagons had not readied him for keeping up this pace for so long.

And then, before the long summer evening had done more than hint at its arrival, the horses passed over the crest of a slight swell in the plain, and they were moving through a flock of sheep. Small, brown sheep with patchy wool, chewing contentedly on the steppe grass and paying no heed to the two riders and one walker who passed between them. Beyond the sheep were four round tents, each the size of a villager's house, and as many wagons. A shirtless child of ten years old, the same shade as the rest of the barbarians, waved to the riders and called out. "Aspice, iam redeunt!"

There were not enough people among the tents to make a swarm, exactly. Only enough to make this clearly a village of its own sort, if a very small one by any standard. Several children scampered out to meet the riders, adults immediately behind them. The barbarian man on the horse dismounted in an easy leap to swing a woman his own age, pregnant and showing sharp white teeth with her laughter, up in his arms. The barbarian woman with Zheru's leash remained mounted, leaning down to speak with one child or another, and to nod politely to the various adults.

It seemed that everyone of more than six or seven years old wore a knife at their side. All but a barbarian woman with close-cropped hair and a leather collar, who carried an infant on her back and a basket in her arms. Zheru gave up on considering which were dangerous, and attempted to pick out the family groups. The wife and two small children for the man who had been traveling. A married couple, somewhere below forty, with several children of their own, and the servant. A pair of girls too old to be the children of anyone and unassociated with any of the families in a way that he could see, bright with questions for the riders.

The chatter was an incomprehensible din around him. None of it directed at him, though several people looked his way, and made comments afterward. He stood at the side of the woman's horse with his chin up and shoulders back, watching everything sidelong and staring at no one directly. The sidelong appraisal told him that she in turn was waiting for someone who had not yet arrived. He could scarcely see how anyone else could fit into four tents; they would be stacking the children in piles inside, at night.

There was, it seemed, one more barbarian to appear: a man not much older than Zheru, if taller, in an embroidered shirt so white it would have broken a few laws to wear within Cetho. He strode towards the woman on horseback, limping slightly all the way, and offered her a hand. "Nondum dies vos exspectavimus. Fortuna ibi?"

She took his hand, and swung down from the horse directly into an embrace. And just as Zheru had decided they must be husband and wife as well, she stepped back and took the man by the shoulders, then ruffled his hair. Brother and sister, then, and entirely fond in their regard for another.

He thought of his own sisters, and looked towards the horizon.

"Parva fortuna, periculumque parvum," the woman was saying. "Hic, donam summae aestatis ad te adtuli." She untied his leash from the saddle, and passed it to her brother.

The man turned to Zheru with a thoughtful sort of expression. Zheru might have called it a scholarly examination, in less barbaric surroundings. Given the stare, Zheru let himself stare right back. Now that he was looking for the signs, he could see the similarity between the two barbarians: high cheekbones, square jaw, near identical in frame, though the man was built more slightly and an inch or two shorter than his sister.

"Well, then," said the man, in Ethuverazhin as crisply enunciated as Zheru had ever heard, "you might as well come inside, and tell us your name."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The author is quite aware that head injuries leading to unconsciousness can cause brain damage, internal bleeding, long-term side-effects, and so forth. But that is neither tropey nor fun. Thus, Zheru has suffered the cinematic-style head injury that results in nothing but a bit of a nap and maybe a headache on waking, to suit the general tone and genre of this story.


	7. Chapter 7

The tent cut away the sun like a knife. The air of the steppes was not so thin to make the temperature difference between sunlight and shade as extreme as it was said to be in the upper mountains, but Zheru stumbled all the same, crossing that threshold into the cool and darkness. Given the privacy to do so, he might well have simply fallen down on his side and lain there until a better idea occurred to him.

But the man holding his leash caught him by the shoulder, and the woman who had caught him before, in a rather different sense, was following close behind. So Zheru kept his footing and his pace, until he was pushed down, gently enough, to sit on the floor.

The tent was not dark inside, except by contrast to the lazy summer twilight, and his eyes adjusted rapidly. A hole in the center of the tent's ceiling, not so large as a wagon wheel, let in light and carried out the flue of an ordinary iron stove. A samovar, of quite different design than he had seen before, and yet recognizably itself, sat on top of the stove; a thin line of smoke twisted from its top toward the hole in the ceiling. If he kept his eyes on that domestic object, ignoring the textures and smells and sounds of the world around him, down to the rough nap of the carpet he sat on, he could pretend it was one of his brother's breakfast sets. Lancathis owned a half dozen sets in different styles from the furthest reaches of all the house's trade routes, and Zheru never saw them except when he was summoned to breakfast for a scolding lecture.

"You will have to excuse our sister," said the barbarian man, while the sister in question dropped into a lazy sprawl beside Zheru. "She never cared much for this language. We are Yirei Aicran, Hremaista, Vlasdaista, Athlidsta, and so forth. You may call us Yirei. Our sister is Irlaav Aicran, the rest following in similar manner, though you will not want to call her by name often." His smile was mild, beneath eyes the same copper color as his sister's. "What are you called?"

"Zheru Shadoär." It was like being a person again, and not a piece of luggage, to be able to give his name out; Zheru did not dare trust that feeling. "Our family would--"

"Later," said the man. Yirei, then, a name that sounded nothing like an elf's, nor even a goblin's, from start to finish. He rolled the leash up, and set it in Zheru's lap. "You will find it easier to be quiet until we ask you questions."

"Nimis benignus servis semper es," said his sister fondly. She leaned back on her elbows, head hung back and hair falling across the floor. "Poculum mihi funde et cenam mihi inveni, Yirei, fame interfio."

Yirei moved about the tent at a leisurely pace, that hitch in one leg with every other step. It was a round space, with straight walls high enough to let him stand straight even near the edges of the sloping cloth that made up the roof. The furniture and belongings inside were a mystery to Zheru; he could identify bags and a chest well enough here, there a stool beside baskets of dark fur, but none of it made the kind of sense he associated with ordinary workspaces or living spaces. Neither bedroom nor office, kitchen nor factory nor farmyard. On reflection, he had no idea what barbarians _did_ when they weren't occupied with raiding towns of the badlands, or attacking military positions.

He tried to consider the barbarians as shepherds with occasional violent urges, and could not make sense of the idea. Farmers raised sheep, and were not in the habit of swarming down on their neighbors to steal anything they could carry. That he could recall. Perhaps that lay in one of those drearier stretches of history he had ignored when his tutors covered the topic.

Yirei returned from some corner of the room--a metaphorical corner, given the shape of the tent--with three cups: one of thick green glass, cut with a triangle design, and two of simple pottery, though neither matched. "Dice eum non dominulum esse," he said, filling the glass cup from the samovar.

Irlaav propped herself upright only far enough to accept the cup her brother offered. "Non dominulus, sed mercatorius agnellus, suo ab grege aberrans. Nulla insectationis prope est. Satisne bellus tibi est?"

Yirei filled the other cups. "Tam bellus ut inimici mei eum furari tentent." He sat cross-legged across from both of them, a cup in each hand. "Meditationem tamen uti possum, et sodalitatem."

"Sodalitas! Si eum ita appellare vis." Irlaav laughed, and drank from her cup.

"It may be for the best," Yirei said, switching so smoothly back to Ethuverazhin that it took Zheru a few words to realize the change had been made at all, "that you can't understand her." He placed one of the cups between Zheru's hands. "We will correct that later. What were you saying about your family?"

"They will ransom us," Zheru said, an ugly truth said as quickly as he could, before he was interrupted again. "If you send word that we are still alive." His fingers closed around the hot cup, and he wondered if he could drink from it neatly with his wrists bound that way. He was nauseous with hunger and fear both, and would rather have starved than spill tea across himself in such company.

"No doubt they would." Yirei drained his cup, a long motion that showed off the pale blue of his throat. "However," he said, setting the cup down, "we cannot see any reason we would want to make such a bargain. Do you imagine we desire the money you use?"

"Trade goods," Zheru said carefully. "Of any sort you might name."

"Wagons of wheat, then?"

"If you like. Or silk, if you prefer."

Yirei smiled, showing his fangs. "If we had a large family, a host of servants, wagons to hold such items, oxen to pull the wagons... We have a sister, who brings us presents, and enough of the rest for our needs. Except for servants, of which we haven't even one, until now. Drink your tea, Zheru."

"If only--"

Yirei caught his jaw between long, slender fingers that proved to be nearly as strong as Irlaav's. Not a slap. Certainly enough of a grip to make the cut at the corner of his mouth pang.

"Wait for questions," Yirei said gently. "And drink your tea. We will have enough need of conversation from you later."

The tea was brewed too strong, mixed with sheep fat, and so hot it scalded with every sip. Zheru drank it down one careful sip at a time and listened to the barbarians chat amiably with each other.

He could pick out words, here and there, in repetition. Not what they meant, but their recurrence. That was a start to something. Or maybe only a distraction from what was already around him.

#

Pale light slanted in through the open door of the tent as the sun crept towards the horizon, and Irlaav left in the company of the pregnant woman who was the other raider's wife. Zheru sat where he had been placed. One of his feet was starting to go numb, and the gnawing hunger was back after a brief tea-induced respite.

Yirei leaned against him, shoulder to shoulder, and said, "Let me see your hands."

Every unrefined command was a reminder of the circumstances, but there was scarcely anything that wasn't such a reminder, anymore. Zheru held up his hands, and bit back several comments that came to mind.

"We are glad to see that our sister remembers her knots," Yirei said, "and you are unlikely to lose any fingers." He untied the cord in a direct, leisurely manner that reminded Zheru of the barbarian raiders packing up their temporary camp. No motion hurried, and no motion wasted. "As she stole you from the road, rather than your bed, we needn't supply you with any new clothing yet. Though you may need to remove some of the buttons on that shirt. Do you spend all morning dressing yourself?"

_No, I have a man who manages that for me._ Zheru did not trust himself to fake a smile, or get away with any cutting remarks, and so he only said, "They go quickly enough."

"Do they?" Yirei stood up. "We'll see. Take off those boots, Zheru. There'll be no call for wandering about this evening." He walked away to open the stove, and stoke up coals bedded inside, without watching to see if his orders were followed. "We will have to find another name for you."

Zheru sat back, shaking out the foot that had begun a sharp prickling from his weight. "Mer Shadoär suffices for most who wish to address us."

"Such formality." Yirei turned back long enough to throw a smile his way, showing those fangs again. The points were unsettling every time they appeared. One might almost take a barbarian for a man with elvish skin and goblin hair, in dim lighting, if not looking too closely at his ears: but the teeth gave the lie to that impression. "Mer Zheru Shadoär, you will not need titles here, and no one else will be able to _pronounce_ your given name. Besides," he added, closing the stove door, "only children share their given names with every passing stranger. We will find you a use-name."

Zheru looked at the tent's entrance, a wide rectangular hole with its covering flap tied back. A few yards away, no more. And then a great deal further to wherever the horses might be kept, likely without tack, and the camp full of children in every direction and several adults. Every one of them armed with knives, but for the servant woman with an infant.

He pulled off his boots, and set them as neatly beside each other as Dasma would have. _If all the soldiers in the badlands give up and consider me lost, he at least would still search for me. Or better yet, send word to my house, which can turn more assets toward finding me._ "Where did you learn Ethuverazhin?"

"From a tutor. Our father procured one for us and our sister, when we were much smaller, in hopes of making translators out of us. He was more successful with the one than the other. Our sister understands a great deal more than she has ever cared to admit." Yirei was busy with a pot, a jug, other kitchen tools of the sort Zheru had never paid much attention to. "She left us last winter to marry a man of a different clan. We were not able to dower her as well as we would have liked, but she will be comfortable enough. Since then, we have had no one to speak the language with, which we find inconvenient. Any skill left unpracticed will atrophy."

"Where does one find a tutor to barbarians?" Zheru asked.

"One steals people who might suit, until a sufficiently learned one is in hand."

"Ah," Zheru said. He drew his knees up to his chest, arms upon them, and tried not to look at the doorway. "So it is something of a family tradition."

"Rather." Yirei brushed fingertips across the top of Zheru's hair as he moved past. "Also, the term you want is Nazhmorhathveras."

"Pardon?"

"Nazhmorhathveras," Yirei repeated, setting out one syllable at a time to make the word that much easier to follow. "Not 'barbarians' or other words you might consider using in our presence."

"It is merely a descriptive term," Zheru said, "not an insult."

"Descriptive." Yirei sounded amused. "Well, we have heard far more serious insults than that. Nonetheless, it is not the correct term." He set a lid atop the pot on the stove, and left that to its heating, taking a seat on the floor across from Zheru again. "During the...we suppose you would call it the last war, between your people and ours, our father had us translate for him when prisoners were questioned. We have heard a great many insults, and learned the value of precision in wording."

"We suppose you would," Zheru said, as evenly as he could. None of his friends had ever served in the military. He knew enough, all the same, from newspapers and novels and gossip, to understand what _questioned_ meant. In an imprecise way. With enough detail to be glad of what imprecision was left. "How old were you then?"

"Nine or ten, near the beginning. Twelve or so, at the end. It was a very informative period in our life." The man leaned in a little, hands on his knees. "We will teach you our own language, as time allows. A fair sort of exchange. Can you manage our use-name yet?"

"Erei," Zheru said. "Ierei?"

"Yerei. You will have some trouble, coming to it this late." He tapped Zheru beneath the chin with a knuckle. "Try again."

"Ierei," Zheru said. He liked it no better on the third attempt. "Perhaps your sister should have kidnapped someone younger."

"Children are terrible conversationalists. Try again, pet. It's only two syllables, and--oh, how your ears _move_." Yirei laughed, sitting back. "We are not being terribly polite, are we, to say so? Yet it's true. All you elves, showing everything you feel to the world. It's a wonder any of you can tell lies at all."

Zheru flicked his ears back to a neutral position, and in the same voice he used for lying to his mother about how late he had been out at night, said, "We are entirely incapable of deceit, Yirei. Surely you know that by now."

"You are a quick study," Yirei said. "How lucky for us that our sister chose you, and not someone dull." He stood again, patting Zheru on the shoulder. "We will teach you how to say 'Dinner is ready,' so that you can fetch her when this is true. It's quite simple. Two words, a noun and an adjective with a verbal affix."

Zheru turned his wrists over in his lap. They still bore chafe marks from the cord. "We have never spoken any language other than Ethuverazhin."

"Then you will find this very educational, won't you?"

#

The children stared at Zheru when he left the tent to find Irlaav. "Aspicite illum virum ovidentatum," said a small girl, pointing at him. "Ovidentate, fregistine dentes tuos?"

"Omnes ita sunt." said her slightly older brother, with an air of great authority, and tugged her away by the hand.

It was not _difficult_ to find the woman who had kidnapped him. She sat outside of the next tent over, cross-legged on the ground with her horse's tack in her lap. He had seen Eikho work over the tack from her mule team in much the same manner. The second raider's wife sat beside her on a stool, working embroidery on the collar of a shirt.

Zheru pictured how the servants at home would appear to summon him to dinner: the polite rap at the door, a duck of the head, then the message delivered once he had given them his attention. Perfect posture, and infinite patience.

He ran his tongue along the cut at the edge of his mouth. Infinite patience was all very well for people like Dasma, who had decided to join a profession calling for it. "Cena parata est," he said to Irlaav, arms folded over his chest.

She bundled up the bridle she had been working on, and rose to her feet. "Frater agnum suum dicere discit," she said to the other woman. "Quid intellegat minus erit."

"Roga eum an hoc vendat, post mensem mensesve," said the pregnant woman calmly. She considered him no threat, and was in the right.

Irlaav set a hand to the back of Zheru's neck as she passed him, and brought him along to the tent in that manner. He had not meant, precisely, to dawdle or wander, having nowhere else to go and far too many people watching; it still rankled that she would guide him back into place. With the physical leash removed, she held the idea of it in her hand.

They fed him like part of the family, all three of them seated on the floor of the tent and the two siblings speaking to each other in the language he could barely pick out words from. They were, he suspected, the smallest of the families in the camp, unless everyone there was related. A brother and a sister with no children, no parents, no one else to fill the space around them. The tent encompassed a space about the size of his bedroom, which had once been the nursery. A reasonable space for one person, when attached to a large house; a large and lonely space for two, set out in the middle of the steppes.

_Or perhaps I think "lonely" because I'm alone. Certainly no one else looks unhappy._ Zheru bent his head over his bowl. It held a meat he couldn't identify, neither mutton nor beef, with long green strands of wild onion, and enough of both that he didn't ask for more. He did not want to know what would happen if he asked for anything. Irlaav's knife, and Yirei's smile, had him frozen up in the middle even when neither weapon was on display.

Yirei cleaned up after dinner without ordering or requesting help. Zheru eyed the man's sister, who was keeping up a leisurely string of conversation during this work. She seemed uninterested in offering any assistance either. There was no simple pattern he could put it in, not for how his family managed anything, nor his friends when out hunting, nor less wealthy families without servants, nor the way the caravan handled it on the road. The wrong people in the wrong places, behaving according to a logic that made sense to them and was invisible to him.

"Auxilio huic egeam," Yirei said to his sister, and then to Zheru, "We will have to do something about your hair," as if the one statement followed from the other.

Zheru raised a hand to his braids, which had held together remarkably well despite everything they had been through lately. Dasma arranged travel braids for functionality, not fashion; sleeping on the ground had done nothing good for the latter, at that. "The steppes seem to lack convenient bathing facilities for travelers."

"Rather." Yirei laid a hand atop Zheru's head, and then knelt on the floor behind him, keeping that hand in place. "This would be a bother, if we were to leave it so. We'll have to cut it."

Zheru jerked away. Tried to, but Yirei's fingers had closed into his hair, and caught him short, while Irlaav settled down in a crouch in front of him. She drew one of her knives. The same one she had put to his throat once before, or its matched partner, now held loosely in her hand and pointing toward the floor.

"Please," Zheru said, "please don't."

"We suspect," said Yirei, his breath across Zheru's ear, "that you have never had your hair cut in your life. We assure you, it will not hurt, unless you struggle so much that we cut you by accident. How embarrassing that would be, for the both of us."

" _Please._ " There were no words sufficient. No evasions to make, in body or voice, while Irlaav watched him steadily with those copper eyes. Nor any way to replace what could be lost. Rings and watches and coats could be lost, nothing but property, but they were never part of _him_. External and replaceable. "Please don't. I won't make any trouble."

"You must understand," said Yirei, gathering up the braids that lay between Zheru's shoulder blades, "that our kindness should not be mistaken for a lack of conviction. This is not a negotiation."

Irlaav turned her knife contemplatively. The blade glinted in the last of the evening light. "Auxiliumne vis?"

"Nondum volo," Yirei told her. He leaned in against Zheru's back. "This is very simple. All you have to do is hold still."

Zheru's breath hitched. _There is nothing to be done about this, and only a fool would argue the point,_ he thought, digging his fingers into his knees, and still said, "Yirei, please, don't."

Yirei sat back, taking the braids up in his hand. "Hush," he said gently, and the knife Zheru never saw him draw tugged against the braids.

The knife sawed through the hair behind him, and in front of him, Irlaav watched steadily. No sympathy in those eyes, nor contempt. She watched him the way she would watch a newly broken horse being saddled, to see if it was still inclined to bolt.

Zheru jerked against the hand in his hair. Pure reflex. He was pinned as neatly as any webbed fly. Irlaav leaned in and didn't even have to raise her knife to make the threat clear.

He could feel the tears across his face, and wished for--impossible things. That he had never begun the journey. Never wandered far enough to be caught. That he had somehow been clever enough, fast enough, to have escaped or argued or otherwise found a way around what he had been brought to.

When Zheru was very small, he had learned to cry at will. A useful approach, until he had become too old to draw sympathy with that tactic, and he'd had to learn the opposite: to never cry at all, whatever he felt. It wasn't appropriate for boys of a certain age. He clenched his teeth together and felt hopelessly childish and broken, to have lost what control he once had in that regard.

He closed his eyes so that he could not see Irlaav watching him anymore, and waited for it to be over.

"Was that so terrible?" Yirei asked. He dragged his fingers through the remains of Zheru's braids, unweaving them one by one. Zheru did not trust himself to answer, and did not try. "You will appreciate this, in a month."

Irlaav stood up. "Agnus non gratus est." She left them, to take off her boots near the tent's entrance. "Matutine cras discedemus, Yirei."

"Scio," Yirei said shortly. He patted Zheru on the shoulder, and stood up in turn. "Go to sleep. You'll feel better afterward."

A difficult line to believe, that. And yet an easy to command to follow, as it turned out. The brother and sister tucked him between the two of them in a disorganized pile, casual as puppies about tucking up against each other, with a wool blanket pulled over all three. He lay awake for long minutes in the tent, staring at the small of Yirei's neck, one of Irlaav's legs resting over his.

Sleep caught him with muddled dreams, and didn't last nearly long enough.


	8. Chapter 8

Zheru woke to the insistent prodding of a boot to his ribs. He cracked his eyes open to show a response, however groggy, before that could escalate to kicking. "It is," he said, on realizing how little different the open eyes were making, "the middle of the night."

"It is nearly dawn," Yirei said from rather further away. That suggested it was Irlaav doing the prodding. "Would you like any breakfast?"

Zheru scrubbed a hand over his eyes. His muscles ached worse than they had when he went to sleep, which had been...six hours ago? The sort of thing he would have checked on his watch, had he any such possession left to him. "What is breakfast?"

Yirei smiled, his sharp teeth a flash of white. "Only available for a short moment in time."

Breakfast was, as it turned out, more cheese and a cup of yogurt. Likely the same cup that had been used for tea the night before, though such details were still invisible in the gray of earliest dawn. The cheese crumbled in Zheru's hand, mild in the center and coated with bitter herbs. _They must not age anything for long,_ he decided, licking his fingers indecorously clean in the near privacy afforded by the light. _They can scarcely put together a proper wine cellar or cheese cave without permanent structures. Unless they hide all their ripening parmesan in the north, near the mountains._ This led to the sudden thought that the barbarians might not have any sort of alcohol at all, and he decided not to contemplate that miserable hypothetical any further.

There was little dressing to be done, after sleeping in his shirt and trousers for the second night in a row. He pulled on his boots and laced them up himself. Difficult in the dark, when he was more used to Dasma handling the matter, but far from impossible. Laces and knots where simple, where he could see them. Braids, done up behind one's head, were another matter entirely--

He remembered, and felt light-headed twice over, at the thought and at realizing why he felt off-balance every time he turned his head. The weight of nearly two decades of hair was, like his pocket watch, something he was so used to having in place that he never felt the pressure until it was gone. His cut hair slid loosely across his shoulders. It was almost more of an insult than a complete crop, to have enough hair left that it could tangle and fall in his way, and not enough left to braid properly.

"You'll make a mess of it if we don't do something." Yirei crouched down beside him. "Ah, don't look at us like that, your thoughts are all written across your face."

"How you can see any expression in this light, we don't know," Zheru said.

"We have always seen better in the dark than elves." Yirei gathered Zheru's loose hair, and tied it off with a strip of leather at the nape of his neck. "Though our tutor said that this was as much from our way of life as anything else."

However that poor woman had been caught by barbarians, she sounded to have kept her wits about her the entire way through. Zheru wondered if he could manage as well, or if managing in that manner was itself a sort of failure. To be sure, the heroes in the novels would have effected an escape by now. "What was her name?"

Yirei stood up. "Our father named her Qega." That was an answer to a different question than Zheru had asked, and all the answer he was likely to get. "We can speak more after packing."

#

What Yirei called "packing" was done in the cold dawn: a complete disassembly of every tent in the camp, each one stowed, with its own contents, in a single wagon. The pieces fit together as neatly as any puzzle figurine Zheru had assembled as a child, though there was no reason why baskets, stoves, bundles of wool, chests, stools, tent struts, blankets, and every other accoutrement of the barbarian way of life should be that simple to arrange. Simple, in any case, for the people who stood at the wagons, fitting each item into place as it was brought to them. Zheru was handed one armful of supplies after another, and expected to walk them several yards away, then return. Mindless labor.

He would have been more offended if he thought he could do any other task well. Even the harnessing of the wagon teams involved different arrangements of straps and buckles than the mule teams had. None of the many horses around camp were set in harness: that place was for the largest young bullocks of a cattle herd that seemed to belong to the older family of the camp. The cows were broad-shouldered, with low heads and horns that crooked twice in their curves. Children brought the bullocks over to the wagons with leashes clipped to nose-rings, and there the adults would pause from their arrangement of baggage into wagons to set each animal into harness in turn.

The camp was disassembled, scoured, and stowed in under an hour. The four wagons, each a wide bed set atop four wheels with neither a back gate nor any top, set into motion one after another. There was no particular signal given; one woman snapped a long-handled whip over the backs of her team, and then the next driver did the same a minute later, like alley cats wandering away from a bowl when they had eaten their fill.

Irlaav rode up to Yirei with a second saddled horse on lead, and tossed the lead to her brother in much the way she had passed Zheru's leash about before. "Nonne voles ei cingulum? Ita prope patriam eius sumus ut aufugere tentet."

Yirei swung up into the horse's saddle. "Mihi parum crede, Irlaav." He wheeled the horse around, and said to Zheru, "Come along, then."

"We don't suppose there's any chance of a horse for us," Zheru said.

"No, not in the slightest, but if you are very tired, you may sit at the back of the wagon with the little children." Yirei pointed helpfully to the nearest wagon as it rolled away. There was a child perched on its end, maybe three years old, a doll of woven grass clutched in one hand.

Zheru set his ears up properly. If he was, for the moment, the sole representative of the Elflands entire for this little barbarian tribe, he might as well represent the empire well. "We doubt that will be necessary," he said, and set to walking.

He was painfully cold for the first ten minutes. The sky was still gray, if clear, and a brisk wind cut right through his shirt, which had not been designed for use without a jacket. All the sweat produced by the labor of packing chilled against his skin, and stuck the fabric to him. The pace wasn't enough to warm him, either; the barbarians' wagons moved at the same amble the silk wagons had, and the herds moved so slowly that an animal at the front could drop its head and graze for a minute straight without being bothered. The herding, such as it existed, was done by children on horseback with long-handled whips to flick at any hoofed beast that fell too far behind.

_Perhaps at the two-legged creatures as well,_ Zheru thought, _if one were foolish enough to dawdle._ His ears flicked at the thought, and that was one more reminder of how unnatural the world had become around him. That gesture should have been accompanied by the jingle of earrings against each other, an audio cue as much as a visual one about how he felt; instead, it was a silent reaction. A meaningless one, with no one looking at him directly to see it. He was given as much attention as any one sheep or cow, and less than the bullocks in harness.

The herds moved, the sun rose, and the child sitting at the back of the wagon began singing. It was an aimless, drifting song in the child's high voice, meaningless as the indignant baaing of the sheep when they were chivvied away from the grass. Then another child picked up the song, and a third, on foot and on horseback, until half the camp on the move was carrying the words with them.

It was nothing like opera, and very little like choir performances. Perhaps more like the folk songs of villagers, the sort a beggar might sing on a corner with a bowl in front of her. Long verses, with lines ending in the same repeated patterns. They were all off-key. Or, Zheru decided, in a key unlike the ones he knew, as the singers held to it together. There was a higher part that the children sang, and a lower part that one adult or another took up now and again to complement it. The song had no definite end; singers simply stopped when they were distracted, picked up again, and eventually all of it drifted away into nothing but the humming of one of the children on horseback.

He was no longer cold. If the steppes were anything like the badlands, he expected to be as uncomfortably hot as he had been the reverse, before noon.

Irlaav rode past, her sturdy little horse pulling against the trot it was allowed. Zheru turned to watch her go, though she had eyes only for the horizon. He couldn't tell if she was retrieving a forgotten item from the camp, or acting as scout in case of dangers at the back.

The latter, he decided, on seeing another horse and rider peel away from the group, in the opposite direction. That was likely the second member of that band of raiders, though he did not know any of the barbarians well enough by the backs of their heads to tell. They were all of a kind, blue-black hair and blue-white skin, in their clothes of brown and gray and white. The embroidery on collars and cuffs limned them like the red ink newspapers used to highlight important details in woodcut illustrations. It was all, if he let himself drift away from the physicality of his own walking, unreal yet again. Strangers with a strange language, peculiar in appearance and set against an infinitely flat land of unchanging grass, all the way to the horizon. _They might as well be illustrations in a book. "Diagram 17: steppe nomads in motion. Observe the slight difference in ear shape, the line of the jaw, their saddles and harnesses of different design than our own." A better observation in a book than in person, that. I would have entered a university if I had known the alternative._

"You spend too much time thinking," Yirei said lazily, from atop the horse Zheru walked beside. "Is it an affliction of elves, or a personal one?"

Zheru's ears bent down, despite his effort to keep them neutral. "Ought we be doing anything else?"

"You could give us conversation in Ethuverazhin. We do need the practice." The man smiled down at him, showing white fangs. "Unless you would prefer some other assignment?"

"Certainly we are able to hold a conversation," Zheru said, before he could find out what the other options were. Nothing to be preferred, he was certain. "We are more often scolded for an excess of conversation than its lack. What would you like to talk about?"

Yirei made an ambivalent gesture. It was not unlike being confronted by a tutor, and expected to come up with reasonable questions about texts assigned.

"To be sure," Zheru said dryly, "that is our favorite topic." That got him another smile, though he wasn't certain why. "Very well. Why are we traveling north?"

"North by northwest," Yirei said, "as we see it. Where would you expect the camp to move? We are already far too southerly for midsummer."

Zheru attempted to picture a map. The badlands, the steppes, the mountains... He had always thought of the mountains as the far north, despite knowing there were people beyond. Civilized people, who sent ambassadors to court, and conducted their disagreements with neighbors through civilized means of tariffs or direct war. The steppes ran along the north and west, and for all that the beginning of them seemed already quite north to him, if he set them against the run of the badlands, and the hills there... Yes, there was a great deal more north to be had, and still be on the steppes. A camp being unusually far south did explain why raiders would appear where none were expected, when the army knew to station soldiers in forts and patrol the roads against exactly this sort of thing.

"Why were you so far south in midsummer?" he asked, before Yirei could decide he had broken his part of the implied contract.

"There was a disagreement with a large family," Yirei said. "It seemed advisable to put some distance between us, for a time."

"The sort of disagreement that requires a hundred miles of space, if they are all to the north part of the steppes?"

"The sort of disagreement that requires blades drawn, if one has not given everyone enough time to pretend nothing happened."

"Ah," Zheru said. "Over women?"

"Dogs."

" _Dogs_."

"They were very good dogs," Yirei said, "and now we have none. So the stars turn. What brought a man like you to a village like that, in midsummer?"

_The excellent and virtuous intentions of my family, who would all be appalled at how this all turned out. Dameän is likely shouting at Lancathis about it right now, as if any of it were really his fault. If they even know yet._ Zheru shrugged loosely. "Silkworms are raised in one location, the silk turned to thread in another, then to cloth in a third, and finally people in a fourth location entirely wish to buy the results. Not even taking into account the dyeing, or the tailors. There is money to be made in facilitating all of this."

"Are you much interested in cloth, then?"

"Hardly. We are aware that there are worms at one point, factories at another, scissors near the end. The silk itself is of little interest, except when we are having clothes made for ourself. The silk itself is all rather fungible."

"Fungible." Yirei clicked his tongue. "We have not heard that word before. What does it mean?"

Zheru could hardly remember a time when he had not known the word. It had featured in many long discussions between his parents back in the vague memories of youth, while he sat on the rug nearby and played quietly with his toys. Adults had always been happy to let him play nearby, if he could be quiet, quite unlike his sisters. "It means--interchangeable. An item that can be replaced with another item, just like it, without one caring which of the two is at hand."

"Identical?"

"Ah. Not precisely. Identical things may be fungible, as with two coins, or not at all, as with two twins. Or you might have two cows with different markings, clearly not the same beast, and promise the butcher either of the two, without it mattering which, if they came to the same weight."

"A useful concept for a man whose living is made of nothing but passing items between other people," Yirei said. "Well. A new word. Fungible." He reached down to brush a hand across the top of Zheru's head, a sort of _pay attention_ gesture that turned into pointing. "We will teach you several new words in term. These are sheep, yes?"

A raggedy brown lot with bending horns, but certainly sheep of some kind. "To the best of our knowledge, yes."

"Ovis," Yirei said, "at least when taken one by one. Now say it yourself."

Zheru flicked an ear silently on that side. "Why should we need to refer to sheep?"

"Because we wish for you to know the language," Yirei said. He smiled once more, always with such sharp teeth. "And we wish to know how quickly you learn such things, and how well you remember them."

The morning was spent on animals, by and large, with occasional verbs of motion. Words for animals were tedious but simple enough. Here a hawk, there a cow, and nothing to do with any of it but memorize the word exactly, and then learn how to make it fit into different parts of a sentence. The verbs were more difficult; Yirei insisted on beginning with what was not exactly a tense of verb, but something else entirely, establishing that the action occurred once and in a moment. "It's simpler," he said, "because all the other parts of a verb are built from that." But it meant that so simple a sentence as "The cow walked" remained well beyond Zheru's command of the language after hours of instruction.

"It would be far simpler," Zheru said, after repeating the word for hawks (or perhaps only a specific type of hawk, the one pointed out overhead) a good dozen times without managing the vowels as Yirei wanted, "if you could write this down."

"We are scarcely about to encourage such an approach," Yirei said. "All that writing is terrible for your memory. A child would know this by now."

Zheru suspected a child would have pitched a tantrum by the half hour mark. "Be that as it may," he said, "we would learn faster in that manner." He paused a moment, as a sheep ambled across his path. "Yirei, _can_ you read?"

"Writing makes a man worse at remembering," Yirei said. "Try again." And that was an answer of sorts.

The procession stopped an hour or so past noon, in a stretch of flat land identical to every other they had walked through since dawn. At most, the grass was a few inches taller, or more closely packed. Grass density was not the sort of thing Zheru had found reason to pay much attention to before. The oxen were turned out of harness to graze with their fellows, and the mounted horses unsaddled. 

When Yirei took a bolt of cloth from the top of the nearest wagon, and threw it down, Zheru caught it. For an instant he had considered _not_ , simply letting it fall and feigning a lack of comprehension--but he could not see how it would help him now to be thought stupid or stubborn. Helping the other man unroll the cloth and tie it in place between two wagons was no difficult task, and more interesting than standing about dumbly or continuing to walk.

The children gathered in beneath the shade, sprawling on the grass and dirt without compunction. A few gave handfuls of green over to the adults, or, from a girl of about seven, a lizard impaled on a child-sized spear. During the walk, Zheru had seen the children scamper away from the group and back now and again, and thought it only play or caprice.

_How stupid they must already think I am, to do nothing but walk and talk, when even the little ones are watching for food along the way._ With this in mind, he accepted another lump of cheese for his lunch, and sat down at the end of a wagon to eat. The repetition of cheese, milk, and cheese again was giving him a new appreciation for even the bitter herbs added to the mix. _Another week of this, and I'll eat lizards as the barbarians do, for the variation alone._

Yirei sat down beside him, already done with eating. "Do you want to know how to name what you're eating, in our language?"

Zheru wiped his hands off on the wagon's bed, instead of licking them clean as he had been intending. "If we did not, would that change anything you mean to say?"

"It might." Yirei drew his feet up and sat cross-legged, watching the southern horizon. "Knowing what people want can be useful, whether or not one intends to cater to them."

"We want to go home," Zheru said. He wanted to pull his knees up to his chest, and rest his chin atop them. That, like crying, was far too childish to do in front of adults, when no one had even drawn a knife on him in so many hours. "Is that useful for you to know?"

"It rather went without saying. One may assume that any given person is attached to their home, wherever it may be." Yirei nodded towards the south, where a horse and rider had drawn into view. Both were too far distant to make out details, but more likely than not that was Irlaav, returning from whatever had drawn her away. "Off in that direction?"

"South, and much further to the east. Cetho."

"The bracelet around your emperor's wrist, yes?"

"In a manner of speaking. Did your tutor cover much of the geography of the Elflands?"

Yirei made an ambivalent gesture. "The more distant a place is, the less interesting it is."

Zheru snorted. And did not flinch, despite the urge, from the direct look that drew.

"You feel otherwise."

"The more distant a place is," Zheru said, "the more profit there is to be made in connecting it to where you are, given suitable goods and buyers. Errand boys are paid a penny to carry groceries a mile to a family's house. Merchants build fortunes and houses out of hauling silk between very distant places. There is a city whose economy centers entirely on building airships, and those are no use at all for short distances. Even _you_ spend all this time traveling. Don't you care what lies on the other end?"

"What lies on the other end," Yirei said, "will be the same whether we care about it or not." He showed a hint of fangs. "Whether I care about it or not. You and I will grow very tired of formality soon, won't we?"

"We have not yet found it wearying."

"Always so formal," Yirei said. "Is that all elves, or another personal affliction?"

The figure on horseback was certainly Irlaav, or another barbarian of the same size and clothing, by what Zheru could make out; she was approaching more slowly than she had left. He looked away from what, as Yirei would say, he could not change by knowing about it. "A family affliction, we suppose. We do deal in silk."

"You must drag a connection between those statements, as I see none."

It was so perfectly obvious a logical sequence, Zheru struggled for a moment to put it into words. "We deal in silk," he said at last, "and all the silk trade is controlled by a few noble houses. Old, established, wealthy houses, who may deal with whoever they like, or _not_ deal with whoever they like. However wealthy or well-connected the other might be. Traditionalists, you understand? So if a family like ours wishes to deal in silk, we must all be...more proper than proper. More traditional than the houses that have been established for centuries, more respectable than any of _their_ members, complying with every point of etiquette that has ever been codified." He laughed shortly, and tapped a finger on his knee. "We, Yirei, are the least respectable member of a quite respectable family, for we go to coffee houses where disreputable sorts discuss politics, and we read satires, and we read the sorts of novels that factory workers read, when they're able. And we must hope that to be kidnapped by barbarians is seen as a misfortune by those very noble houses, not as a failure of propriety."

"Your notions of propriety are strange," Yirei said. "I suppose if you weren't strange, you wouldn't be an elf." He leaned back, and pulled a waterskin from the baggage of the wagon. "Take this to my sister. She'll be in a better mood if she's had a drink before reaching my cousin."

Walking away from the wagons galled Zheru, in knowing he would have to walk right back. Still, if there was a time to object to being ordered about as a servant, that was not the moment. Not with Irlaav, who seemed to hold much rougher opinions on how he ought to be treated, on the immediate approach. He carried the sloshing bag out to her as she approached, and offered it up silently, having no words for object or action in her language yet.

"Credere fratri oportet me," she said, and took the bag. It held milk, not water, that she poured neatly into her mouth for several steps of her horse before she returned it to him. "Tam recte agnos instituit quam eos eligo."

"To be sure," Zheru said blandly, pacing her horse as he had with Yirei's all morning.

She patted him on the head, nearly the same gesture her brother used, and nudged her horse into a trot. The animal was sweat-damp and holding its head low, having seen much harder use than any of the horses moving with the camp. Zheru let himself fall behind, walking at the same pace as before. They were not about to forget him, if he dawdled. But so long as they didn't tie him to anything, he _could_ let the distance grow, and find out how far the metaphorical leash stretched. 

About ten yards, as it turned out, before Irlaav looked back over her shoulder at him, and he decided it was time to hurry.

By the time Zheru caught up with the wagons--a number of hoofed animals had to be navigated around, as they worked through all the grass in the area--Irlaav had found herself an argument. She was in vociferous debate with the oldest man in the camp, who was himself not much beyond forty, while Yirei unsaddled her horse.

Zheru stowed the skin of milk back in the wagon, and went to help Yirei move tack and saddle to a fresh horse. Unlike the matter of the wagon harnesses, the kitting out of a barbarian's horse required much the same sorts of buckles and straps as any elf's riding horse. "What's the trouble?" he asked Yirei, pitching his voice low, and dared to hope for pursuit.

"Family politics." Yirei kneed the horse professionally in the side before tightening the cinch there. This horse was as compact as the other, a sleepy-eyed dun with one white sock. "My sister disagrees with our cousin on principle, when no specific point of disagreement is available. It's nothing for you to worry about."

The second raider had come back to camp from the other direction while Zheru was away, and strode over to join the argument, his pregnant wife close behind. There were now enough voices involved that Zheru doubted he could have followed any line of argument even if he had known the language. None of the children, napping in the shade or chasing wandering animals back towards the camp, paid it the slightest attention. One of the two younger women called out to Yirei from across the camp, her voice cutting across the babble.

One of Yirei's ears tilted slightly, and Zheru suspected that in an elf, that would have been a quite distinct ear-flick of annoyance. "Come along and give me a hand," Yirei said, still entirely calm in voice. "If they all mean to argue, someone has to manage harnesses."

Thus Zheru found himself being educated in how to identify which ring-nosed bullocks of the herd hadn't been in harness already that morning, and lead them back to where Yirei and the two younger women put those into harness. There was also a raider's horse to unsaddle, then another horse to move all the tack to. It was quite unlike any of the pauses the mule wagons had made; every beast that had been under saddle or harness was being changed out, even the horses who had carried nothing but children that morning. The servant woman was busy managing harnesses, but shot him narrow looks every time he brought her another bullock, or passed by carrying a bridle from one horse to another. Zheru wondered if she disliked him for being an elf, or for some other reason. Or perhaps she had another meaning behind the looks entirely; he could neither determine her feelings nor ask after them.

_Knowing what people want can be useful, whether or not one intends to cater to them,_ Zheru thought, in the same cadence Yirei had used for the words, and he finished out the work that was set to him with that turning over in his mind. There were more uses to learning the language than being able to take orders better, weren't there?

Whatever the argument had been, it resolved itself into the wagons moving north again, at a faster clip than before. Irlaav rode off on a fresh horse, and the second raider did the same in the opposite direction. Zheru took his implicitly assigned place at the side of Yirei's horse, and watched that raider shrink in the distance. Speed on the way out, leisure on the way back, it seemed, though he could not quite reason out why.

"Aicra," Yirei said.

Zheru blinked away those thoughts. "We beg your pardon?"

"His name is Aicra," Yirei said, nodding to the man riding away. The barbarians did seem inclined to nod towards people they meant, or point an elbow that way; Zheru began to suspect that pointing fingers at people was considered impolite. "He is no close relation of mine, though his wife is cousin to my cousin's wife. He would like to marry my sister, though he'll never say so. She would tell him no, if he said it, and then that would be the end of the matter."

Zheru tried to imagine Irlaav married to anyone at all. It was only the second most impossible thing in that statement. "Isn't he already married? You said, his wife."

"Yes, and she's a good friend to Irlaav. Hronthi." Yirei nodded toward the pregnant woman, who was driving one of the wagons again. "If my sister were the type to marry, they would get along well. As my sister is not, Aicra ought to know better than to keep dangling after her. A woman who wants to marry doesn't take up scouting or raiding."

"But he's already married," Zheru said.

Yirei shrugged. "He has enough cattle to support two wives, and few enough children to want more."

"...but he's already _married_ ," Zheru said. "What wife would let her husband bring a second into the house?"

"One in need of conversation and assistance," Yirei said. "You elves are so jealous of everything, whether it's land or husbands or cattle."

"We do rather object to having such things invaded or stolen or shared without our permission," Zheru said. "Are your people as generous with your cattle as you are with your husbands?"

Yirei laughed. "Maybe not. Well. I may as well do introductions. Come along." He nudged his horse forward, and Zheru followed.

_Introductions_ proved to be the wrong word, as Yirei chatted with the various adults in the group, and then give their names to Zheru, without there being any encouragement for Zheru to try speaking with the other barbarians in turn. The cousin at odds with Irlaav was named Haathbe, and seemed as friendly to Yirei as could rightfully be expected of a cousin; Haathbe's wife was Credta, and then the servant woman was said to be hers, and named Rasoo, which at least sounded like a proper name for a woman. The pair of young women were Edta and Athlid, and stared at Zheru with a frank appraisal that would have had his mother scolding either of his sisters who did the same. They were not sisters or cousins, as he had assumed, but quite unrelated, and married.

This last point required a certain amount of explanation from Yirei, regarding theoretical husbands, and assignations with men who were not husbands, or the lack of either, and Zheru never did manage to follow how it worked. "Never mind that," Yirei said at last. "They will split off at the next meeting, and it doesn't concern you, in any case. Unless they wanted to buy you, which they couldn't afford as it stands." He patted Zheru on the head. "You make such faces! Worry less about these things. The names will stick in your memory over time."

Remembering names was not what Zheru had been concerned about, and he suspected Yirei knew this full well. "What about all the children?"

"None of them have use-names yet," Yirei said, "so that is none of your concern, either. You aren't being set to mind the children."

_What am I being set to do, other than keep you in conversation?_ A question Zheru had no desire to ask out loud, or have directly answered. "You may as well tell me what the names mean," he said, "if use-names do mean something."

"All names mean _something_ ," Yirei said, but he looked rather pleased to be asked for more words. And it turned out that use-names did mean things: the names of animals and plants and tools, emotions and weather and colors and any number of other more conceptual words. Zheru found himself glad that Yirei knew Ethuverazhin so well, because he could not imagine the difficulty of trying to express through pointing and mime that one use-name mean "melancholy" and another meant a particular _type_ of cloud.

"We could call you Qega," Yirei said, after much discussion of names, and some miles traveled. The heat was almost painful, but there was nothing to be done about that; the sun would continue shining down whatever they did, and there was no shade other than what patch of ground the wagons covered in a given moment. "It would suit you as well as it did my tutor. Though I suppose it would cause some confusion."

"That, and we could not pronounce it." Zheru knew his ears were drooping, and no longer tried to keep them upright. He was tired, hot, and thirsty, and didn't think he could ask for relief of any of these states.

"How often would you need to say your own name?" Yirei grinned suddenly. "Mneyem. There, you will be Mneyem, and no one will argue."

"We have a name already, Yirei." _And I cannot pronounce that one either, as you well know._

"Yes, of course. Who doesn't? But I have saved you from needing to give it out to any stranger who asks. You shouldn't be so ungrateful about gifts that cost you nothing."

"Some gifts are best left in a closet, rather than put on display."

"Ungrateful," Yirei repeated, sounding all the more amused. "You are Mneyem, as we have no closets at hand. I like it."

"What does it mean?"

"Listen for it in conversation, when no one is calling for you," Yirei said, "and you will work it out, eventually." He refused to translate _mneyem_ all the long, hot afternoon, despite loading Zheru down with dozens of other words, until the sun was creeping down and it was time to raise tents all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note for people reading along that I've updated some of the tags on this story to better reflect what's in it already, where the story is going, and expected content. Seemed like a better approach than updating an author's note that people might not see. If I seem to be missing important tags (or using one incorrectly), please let me know, and I'll look into it.


	9. Chapter 9

The second morning was no easier than the first. Zheru woke before dawn in the same tent, Irlaav and Yirei already out of the pile they had slept in, and ate the same sort of breakfast. Packed the same way as before. Set off to walk identical plains, muscles aching in the cold, until the sun rose high and drove him to thirsty weariness in the heat.

He noticed more of what was done during the walk, that day. How the children dashed away to fling spears at lizards and the striped hares of the steppes, or swung down from their mounts to pick handfuls of something green and edible hidden among the grass. (The grass was not all identical, not all inedible but to cattle; it only looked that way to him, even when Yirei named the different plants. One might as well expect a barbarian to distinguish the voices of favorite secondary opera singers, heard through a noisy hall.) How the herds were managed with minimal effort, lead animals nudged in the direction all the rest ought to follow, especially among the sheep. How anyone sitting in the back of the wagon might be working thread on a spindle, or stripping leaves from gathered plants, or otherwise doing some small, useful task even at rest.

He still couldn't make out any words when people sang, no matter what the song was. And it never sounded like a proper melody.

They stopped twice, changing out harnessed teams and ridden horses each time. Three sets in one day looked to stretch the available fresh animals to their limits, as horses with nursing foals were never put under saddle, and cows with nursing calves never put into harness. Their pace was brisker than the mule teams had made, as best Zheru could judge distance across a nigh-featureless steppe landscape, but not by far. Changes to which animals were asked for more labor than walking themselves along could only do so much to compensate for the lack of packed fodder. Or the lack of ready water: they crossed one trickle of water between muddy banks already drying in the sun, and more dry stream beds by far, none of those even large enough to promise much water in damper seasons. If the steppe _had_ damper seasons; Zheru was once again given reason to regret ignoring the efforts of his tutors in the matter of geography.

"Are we in a hurry?" he asked Yirei, at the second stop and change of teams.

Yirei glanced toward his cousin Haathbe. "We are very far south, for this time of summer."

Which meant the rush, insofar as herds and children and packed wagons could be rushed, came as a result of either expected pursuit or family politics. Zheru hoped, distantly, for the former; the camp had spears and knives, and he had seen a few swords in the luggage. It was no defense against even a small group of properly outfitted soldiers, like those he had seen patrolling the roads. All a group of soldiers had to do was _find_ him, and...and his imagination shied away from the exact details of what might result. War was messy business, and he had no desire to be involved in any part of it. Not even the sort of thing the newspapers termed a "skirmish" when they reported on unrest near this fort or that town, out in the badlands.

He had never paid much attention to those accounts in the newspapers. There was no reason to care about the less populated parts of the badlands: they produced little, and bought less. Small towns were the province of peddlers, not real merchants. Places to pass _through_. Well, he had certainly passed through the last one, and now had reason to wish for even a grimy peasant village. Anything with stone walls, a road, and some connection to the civilized world. An abandoned hunting lodge with a clear riding path would have been enough.

Then in the midst of some weary or hopeful reflection like that, Yirei would say to him, "You spend too much time thinking," and there would be another round of words for him to learn. It was easier, in some ways, to simply not dwell on the matter. The possibility of rescue was distant and outside his control; the language of the barbarians was all around him, and within grasp. A very stumbling and slow grasp, but so were many things worth knowing. Zheru could remember the tedium and frustration of learning to recognize letters, scratch them out across a practice tablet himself, and what had that turned into? Poetry and newspapers and novels, and the occasional clandestine note between friends or more-than-friends.

He became very good, by the end of the second day of walking, at saying in the barbarian language, "Please, repeat that. More slowly."

On the third day, he learned to ignore the arguments between cousins. It was inevitable that when Irlaav rode back in, she would start arguing with Haathbe. If Aicra was also present, then he would join in, and then Haathbe's wife Credta would enter the argument to balance the sides. The four of them could make their voices carry for some distance. But it never went further than the shouting. 

A day or two after that, Zheru found he had simply lost count of days spent walking. He could string together incidents in his mind, but not be sure of what day they had happened. Irlaav returning on foot, her horse limping behind her, and the argument that came of it. A long discussion with Yirei about synonyms and antonyms, with examples given from both languages, and something almost like an argument over the exact definition of "arid." A muddy stretch of streambed with no running water left in, and animals nosing through the mud anyway. Aicra back from a scouting ride with one of the steppe deer, no larger than a sheep, slung across his saddle. 

Waking in the middle of the night with tears in his eyes, and falling back asleep again, between warm bodies and under the same blanket. That happened more than once, maybe, but what happened in the night blurred even more thoroughly than the days of walking.

At a certain point, he thought, _It's been more than a week. Everyone in the family knows what happened._ And immediately afterward, _I wish Dasma were here._ It wasn't the right way of saying it, even in his head. He didn't wish his circumstances on anyone. The heat was painful, and every bit of milk and water rationed precisely. His lips wouldn't stop cracking and he was tediously, constantly thirsty.

Yet it would have been easier, in some ways, with Dasma there. The sort of man a person could complain to, and expect the right kind of near-sympathy from in return.

"Thinking," Yirei said to him.

"As we so often do, yes." Zheru pushed hair out of his face. Fine hairs persisted in escaping the string his hair was tied with, where a proper braid could have held them still. "Do you miss your tutor?"

Yirei looked down at him from horseback. His face was shadowed when he turned to that side, at this time in the late afternoon. "Now and again, I suppose I do. Less than I did before. Why do you ask?"

"No reason," Zheru said. "We were only making conversation." He set one foot in front of another, and walked on.

On a day much like another, Yirei sent him to ask the servant woman a question while she was harnessing the second team of bullocks for the day, and Zheru simply could not remember her name. Not her name, not how to ask politely for her attention, not a single word of what he wanted in the maddening language of barbarians who couldn't even sort their verbs properly. Irlaav was arguing with her cousin again, and the noise was giving him nearly as much of a headache as the sun was. 

Zheru stood behind the servant woman for a moment, mind blank--he was certain she knew he was there, and was ignoring him deliberately--before he gave up on all matter of language, and tapped her on the shoulder.

She spun around, startled. 

"Rasoo," Zheru said, finding the name came to him now that he no longer had need of it, and he even remembered the length of the last vowel. He tried to slot the rest of the words together into the question he had been sent with.

But then Yirei was beside him, swinging down from the horse, and slapped him across the face. It was a blow more astonishing than painful, though the pain followed a moment later.

"Quiet," Yirei said. He raised a hand, more as command than threat. "Stay here. Don't touch anything." He paused an instant to see that Zheru was listening, then spun about and stalked away towards his relatives in argument. His limp was more pronounced than usual.

Zheru put a hand to the corner of his mouth. The old healing cut there stung anew, but it hadn't reopened. Yirei didn't hit as hard as his sister.

The argument broke apart in an instant at Yirei's presence. He simply wasn't a participant in these debates, and all four of the barbarians complaining at each other in the same way as they did every other day, morning and afternoon, quieted to listen to him. He addressed his cousin's wife, Credta, with brief gesture back Zheru's way. They spoke too quietly and rapidly for Zheru to pick out much. His own use-name, once or twice, and Rasoo's.

For her part, Rasoo had returned to managing the harness, as if nothing had happened at all. Perhaps nothing had happened. Zheru couldn't make sense of it. He folded his arms tightly, and waited for Yirei to finish with...whatever conversation was apparently necessary. It did not look unfriendly, at least; Yirei and Credta spoke with an amiability one never saw between Irlaav and Haathbe.

Finally Yirei turned away to say, "Come along, Mneyem, and bring my horse."

That, Zheru could do easily enough. Yirei's horse that afternoon was a dozy old mare who left off cropping away the grass as soon as he laid a hand to her bridle. Yirei mounted up, and Zheru followed him away to a place further from the center of the herds. The whole group would be moving again shortly, on to the night's camp.

"I am sorry," Yirei said.

Zheru clasped his hands behind his back, so as not to touch his face again. "We beg your pardon?"

"I should have told you earlier, not to touch Rasoo. She's another family's servant. You..." Yirei hesitated, an uncharacteristic search for words on his part. "It isn't done," he concluded. "If you had seemed inclined to trouble her, I would have told you before."

"Now we know better," Zheru said.

"You are protected as much as she is."

"We will be appropriately grateful, then."

Yirei clicked his tongue. "You can be difficult, Mneyem, but you are clever enough to make up for it, most of the time."

Zheru flicked an ear. That was not exactly a compliment, even if it felt like one. "Did you strike us because you were angry, or as a show for your cousin?"

"Actions have consequences," Yirei said. "So you have learned a new set of each." He hissed out a breath, considering the wagons as those set into motion. "Credta could have demanded more, if she felt her servant had been greatly insulted, but she enjoys feeling magnanimous. As does my cousin. They are a well-matched set."

"Magnanimous people, whom your sister dislikes intensely. One does wonder."

"You are full of questions today." Yirei let his mare wander further from the group, hunting grass stalks that had not already been ravaged by sheep and cows and unsaddled horses. "Well. My father's father was a wealthy man. Perhaps not as you count wealth, but certainly as we do. When he died, his living sons split the herds between them. Cattle for the elder, sheep for the younger, horses divided between. They were close, as brothers sometimes are."

"All these verbs in the past, Yirei. What happened between them?"

"I think sometimes that elves must be deeply impatient creatures," Yirei said. "Then I remember Qega, and conclude it is you who are personally impatient. Nothing happened between them. They married wives, had children, expanded their herds and flocks, acquired servants. Wealthy men. Then the witches said it was time for another battle on the rock, and... You must understand, Zheru, that there is no end to war. Only times when it draws closer to home, or stays further away."

"We suppose so," Zheru said, and tried to remember his history lessons. When had there last been real war near Cetho itself? Not for decades upon centuries.

"In any case," Yirei said briskly, "the both of them died in one battle, and there was a great deal of hasty retreat done. Much was lost, and in war, those who stay at home die almost as easily as warriors do. So the stars turn. My father left behind three children. His eldest daughter, long since married and far to the west. A daughter barely an adult, who had no talent for speaking politely to her elders. A son not yet given a use-name, a year or two out from being any kind of adult."

"Difficult," Zheru said. He could only imagine the lawyers involved, had a wealthy house been left in that state back home.

"And many synonyms for that word, yes." Yirei watched the horizon, and not the wagons or people near them. "Our cousin could have taken everything. He was already married, had a wife and children. Irlaav and I could have been left to starve without so much as a horse to carry us toward distant relatives. He did not. He joined all that was left together, and kept us with him. He set the sheep in my keeping when I became an adult, and a portion of the horses. Irlaav has everything she needs for raiding. In truth, I couldn't manage more than I have. Not without more family or servants than I have."

"And so he took all your inheritance," Zheru said, "and called it generosity."

"Now you sound like my sister." Yirei leaned over to pat Zheru on the head. "Family politics, Mneyem. They're always full of acrimony and kindness. Strangers don't get into these kinds of arguments."

Zheru scrubbed a hand across his mouth. "How a man can know the word 'acrimony' and still define 'arid' incorrectly, we will never understand."

"Always so formal," Yirei said. "Give me a synonym for 'acrimony', then, and we'll make something of that."

#

Walking beside Yirei at the back of the group, Zheru had become accustomed to seeing nothing of where they were going, only where the rest of the group had already walked. Thus he saw the reaction rippling through people and animals alike well before he caught sight of what was ahead. Horses raised their heads to the wind, and sullen cattle found new reason to move forward without a whip behind them. The children managing the herds began to sort the animals: sheep to one side, cattle to another, horses chivvied toward the front.

The animals split to each side like the curtains opening for the first act of an opera, and Zheru saw the stones rising up out of the grass ahead. Three large slabs, each as tall as a house and far wider, sloping down to where the ground bent down as well. Wiry bushes stood in a long, ragged line along what had to be a stretch of water, even if he couldn't see anything but stone and grass there yet.

"How does one find rocks in the middle of the steppes?" he asked Yirei.

"The same way one finds anything," Yirei said. "Things are as they are." He gave Zheru a quick smile. "Though Qega once said that enormous walls of ice had scraped their way across this land, long ago, and left behind stones they swept down from the mountains where they were formed. As well say that a god plucked them out of the stars to fasten here. Who would know which?"

"Walls of ice," Zheru said. "Really?"

"Or some story like that. It was told years ago, when I still asked the wrong sorts of questions."

Then there was no time to talk further, because every adult in camp, and most of the children, were busy with keeping the animals under control about the water. There was a system to it, which Zheru didn't know and could only observe, being told to shoo these sheep back, or bring that horse forward, until every beast had been given its chance at the stream. Or the river, as Yirei called it, though it was nothing Zheru would have given that name: several yards wide, no more than waist-deep at its lowest point, the water flowing downstream so slowly one had to watch dried grass floating on the surface to see that the water was moving at all. 

Whatever it was called, Zheru would have happily waded in between the sheep, given the chance. Instead, he was called back to unload baggage, put up tents, and make himself as useful as anyone else. He could scarcely complain when even the smallest children staggered past him with baskets in their arms, or went shoving poles into place so that the walls of the tents could be hauled upward.

_What I would give for one of those construction machines._ He dug his boot heels into the ground, and hauled on the edge of the tent's roof as he was directed. _Or even a good set of pulleys._

And then, as abruptly as it had begun, all the effort ceased. With hours of daylight left, the entire camp seemed ready to declare the work day over. Tents were up, wagons entirely unloaded, and every animal watered. Zheru drank his fill of water, upstream of where hooves had churned the streambed into a clouded mess, and then went into Yirei's tent to collapse in the shade.

It was quiet enough, inside. The tent walls muffled the sounds of children at play and adults in conversation almost as well as proper walls could've done. He lay on his back, staring up at the hole in the ceiling and the stovepipe run through it, with his arms and legs spread out, and simply...did nothing. It was hard to remember the last time lying still had felt so good.

Yirei walked up to him, and looked down. "Are you enjoying yourself?"

"Yes," Zheru said. "We would lie here forever, an it were allowed."

"Ah," Yirei said, a world of amusement in his voice. "As you like, then." He nudged Zheru's ankle with a boot. "You may grow bored of it eventually."

"Never," Zheru said, and soon he had the tent to himself again.

The tent was quiet, and the steppes were not. Sounds filtered their way in through the walls, all of them a little unreal. (On reflection, more of his life felt slightly unreal of late than he was particularly comfortable with.) The stream made no sound of its own, but the creatures moving through it, children and animals alike, set up a murmur of splashing, baaing, chatter, and so forth. Some woman in camp was singing, and further away someone was--no, two people were--oh, Zheru realized, his cheeks heating, that was no fight, but two people engaging in, well. Marital relations. Rather more loudly than he considered proper, but one could hardly expect propriety of barbarians. And it wasn't as if there was anywhere more private than inside a tent, was there? So it only stood to reason that propriety was being met, as best anyone could in such circumstances. All those children had to come about through the usual manner.

He flexed his fingers against the nap of the carpeting. Even the wool they used here didn't feel like what he was used to back home. Whether that was a difference in the manufacturing process or the sheep, he couldn't say. He'd hardly been planning on spending much time in agriculture. Or whatever one called the nomadic lifestyle. Agriculture was, now that he thought about it, something to do with planting fields, which didn't seem to feature as a popular lifestyle choice among the barbarians. They were the oddest mix of peasants and warriors, or both at once. Men with knives on their belt milking cows, women who raided villages turning out thread on spindles. And all the children were nearly as focused on their assigned work as any adult he had met. It had often seemed unfair to him--especially once he began reading disreputable newspapers--that at an age when he had been playing with toys in the nursery, other children labored in factories. But even out in the steppes, the barbarians set their children to minding cattle, collecting herbs, spinning thread. Perhaps a childhood of leisure was the aberration, and labor the more natural state of affairs.

A theoretical sort of labor at the moment. Sooner or later he would have to sit up, and think about making himself useful. If he had the paper and ink to do it, he could have even made some notes on the barbarian language... As it was, he couldn't think of a single activity in camp that he could do, and wanted to. Even swimming didn't sound appealing in present company.

The flap of the tent shifted, letting in a streak of late afternoon sunlight. Irlaav strode inside, and past him, with only a brief glance downward. He rolled his head to the side, and watched her store away cleaned and tidily bundled tack. She had been far busier than him since the wagons were unpacked. After the tack was stowed, she shrugged out of the loose coat she had been wearing for weeks. That went into a chest; in turn, she took out several flat bracelets, slipping them onto her wrists with practiced ease. Silver and copper, with polished stone squares set into places. It was not at all the style of modern jewelry, but seemed fine enough make.

"You're staring, little lamb," she said, her back still to him.

Zheru blinked. She spoke in her own language, as always, but the words made sense together. He'd been picking up more, but always in fragments, except when Yirei put sentences together for him slowly and in a known order. The rest had been nothing but background noise for...he didn't know how long, anymore. Two weeks? Four? It couldn't be a month, with the length of the days, unless he'd traveled so far north that changed matters again. His sister Amedro would have done a far better job of dealing with being kidnapped, or at least understanding the geography she was moving through when it happened.

Irlaav clipped an earring into one ear, copper ring with blue stone. Her hair lay wet across her back, still bound in a tail. "And now you're quiet," she said. "Consumpsit inter intinerem colloquium totum?"

Zheru propped himself up on his elbows. "We fear you have lost us again."

She snapped the chest shut, and turned to consider him from above. It was not unlike when Yirei looked down on him from horseback; their faces were even more apparent as coming from the same stock, when viewed from below. "Busy, little lamb?"

"We wish you would not call us that," he said.

"Mneyem tot postulationes dicit ut oporteat eum urbanitatem meliorem." She showed her fangs in a smile, and he could not tell if that was acknowledgement that she understood what he said in his language, or only coincidence.

"As you say."

She moved suddenly, from her place at the chest to standing over him in a single clean motion. Her expression was arch, as he had seen on the face of many a minor lord or lady when surrounded by the children of merchants and factory owners. "Quam commodus!" She dropped down over his hips, her knees to either side, leaning over him with a hand to the carpet beside his neck. 

Zheru held perfectly still. There were always knives at hand, and he would rather none of them come out.

Irlaav placed two fingers between his eyes, and pushed his head down to the carpet. Not roughly, but in much the way she had set her tack in order. "Commodus," she said. He'd heard that word before, and could not think of what it meant in the slightest. "Aren't you?"

"We have no idea," he said, and meant it in more than one manner.

She shrugged, and undid the top button of his shirt. All his buttons were mother-of-pearl, tiny slippery circles he hated to deal with himself, and it gave her a moment of trouble to work it free with one hand.

"Um," Zheru said. That was not a helpful word in either language.

She tapped him on the nose. "Quiet." The easiest words to remember in her language were always the commands. Come, go, stop, wait, hurry. Be quiet. He could do that, be still and quiet while she sat on his thighs and undid a second button. Which went no faster than the first; there was a knack to it, which Dasma had and Zheru himself had never learned. She huffed out an annoyed breath, and simply rucked his shirt up to his armpits. Her hands lay cool on his sides.

Irlaav began to undo his trousers, and Zheru flushed a hot red that he could feel all the way to the tips of his ears. "What are you _doing_?"

She paused, leaving her hands in a place he was not much accustomed to having any woman's hands lie. "Loqui futuereve vis?"

"We have _no idea_ ," he said through gritted teeth, terribly aware of what he looked like and felt like all at once. "We do not understand your language."

She laid a palm flat on his sternum, and used her other hand to pull his trousers down, which seemed a move both incomprehensible and without any need for translation. Zheru was certain he ought to say something more appropriate, or do--nearly anything at all rather than lie there, frozen, with Yirei's sister undressing him like a doll. He was minded, abruptly, of the number of dolls his sisters had flung out windows or torn apart as part of some game, while he'd been ever so careful with his own set of tin-cast soldiers and clockwork toys. She held him not so hard as to leave any bruises, despite the cold pressure of her bracelets against his skin, and he had no idea how that might change if he objected.

He was not entirely sure if he _wanted_ to object, but he was quite certain he ought to, if only before anyone else found out what he was doing. What _she_ was doing. What they were doing? He scarcely felt she needed him to do anything but lie back and be obliging.

Light spread across the floor beside him as the tent flap opened, and Yirei said, "Really, Irlaav?"

She paused a moment to look at her brother. There was not a hint of shame to her expression.

"I, alium quem non terres inveni," Yirei said. "Nonne hunc mihi dedisti?"

Irlaav rolled her eyes, and stood up. It took her only a moment to shake her own clothes back in order, and then she left without another word. Though she did ruffle her brother's hair on the way past.

Zheru lay there, flushed hot, chilled from the sudden loss of her body against his, and had no idea what to say.

"Ah," Yirei said, and came to crouch down beside Zheru, his expression wry. "Irlaav is like that. She has always been very..." He waved a hand. "I don't know the exact word for it in Ethuverazhin."

Zheru swallowed in a gulp of air. "Forward," he said. Yirei looked rather dubious at this suggestion. "Aggressive. Encroaching."

"Prone to laying her hands upon whatever she likes," Yirei said. He reached out to run a hand along the edge of Zheru's ear. "She has always been so, but she'll leave be what's mine, if I tell her so. Would you like me to? Every little thing upsets you, and I can't distinguish one kind of excitement from another, when you blush so."

Zheru had not imagined he could flush any hotter, but neither had he ever imagined someone might respond so to finding their unmarried sister in such a state with another man. He scrambled to his feet, and tried to put his own clothes back in place. His trousers were simple enough, but he had no luck at all with the buttons, which were even worse about coming back into their button loops than they were about slipping free.

Yirei rose as well, and pushed Zheru's hands down. "Don't be so upset," he said. "She didn't mean any harm by it." He set a button back through its loop, fingers brushing across Zheru's throat. "If you would rather she not do such things, I'll tell her so. Some men don't enjoy that."

"What," Zheru said, not certain if he meant that as a question.

Yirei fastened the second button, and frowned. "I haven't the words for it in Ethuverazhin. I had always thought my tutor gave me sufficient vocabulary for any situation, yet now I realize that was not quite so." He smoothed the wrinkles of Zheru's shirt with the back of a hand. "That is, words for the kind of thing my sister meant to do with you."

"Ah," Zheru said faintly. Many words came to mind, but most of them were the sort he would never dare say where someone might overhear and report his language back to his brother. Or worse, his mother. "Marital relations?"

"Hardly marital, under the circumstances." Yirei shrugged the matter off. "Whatever you want to call that, if you would rather not engage in such with women, it is no great matter. Some men don't."

Zheru thought, distantly, that he might prefer death to having this conversation. It did not seem an immediate option. "I am not marnis simply because I don't--because your sister would--because I--" He covered his face with his hands. "We are _not_."

Yirei set his hands on Zheru's shoulders, and leaned in near. "Thou'rt forgetting thy formality, pet. What manner of things my sister steals from thee." His smile was as sharp as Irlaav's had been.

"We already knew your sister was a thief," Zheru said. He tucked his hands behind his back. His breathing had almost steadied again. "Did you need anything? That you came in here for. Since you are here."

"So formal," Yirei said, but let go of him. "See what fuel there is for the stove. Dinner tonight will be better than we've had in some time."


	10. Chapter 10

Breakfast was not, for once, followed by packing up camp. It was a leisurely affair taken in the later part of daybreak, while birds chattered at each other in the bushes down by the stream. Zheru found himself flushing every time Irlaav glanced his way. She must have noticed, but she acted exactly as she ever had, and left as soon as she'd finished eating.

"Cultros acuere labor verus non est," Yirei called after her. The tent flap fell shut behind her. "Though why I should expect her to begin listening now," he muttered, "is beyond me."

Zheru licked a thumb clean of the last traces of breakfast. It was mannerly enough, for his surroundings. "Something about knives and work, was it?"

"I really ought to start speaking to you entirely in my own language," Yirei said. "You would pick it up faster. Though I'd have no practice in yours, at that point, so I will simply remain selfish."

"Doing as you like? We can't imagine such action from you," Zheru said blandly.

Yirei used Zheru's shoulder to help lever himself to his feet. "Ah, I'm certain you spent all your time before we met doing nothing but what was expected of you, and never what you liked. Isn't that so?" He grinned. "No? Then come along, Mneyem, and learn to make yourself useful in a new manner."

They waded out among the flock of sheep together, Yirei grabbing one by the horn now and again to check notches carved there. The sheep bore it with a sullen indifference, being unlike horses, hounds, and cats in their manner of reacting to people handling them. Zheru's experience with animal management largely ended with that list, plus or minus some recent direction of bullocks towards harness. He eyed a brown ram, and the ram stared back at him, expressionless, as it chewed through the tough grass of the steppes.

"We were nearly too late," Yirei said. "Look at how the wool is separating."

Zheru looked at the ram. Its wool looked very much like he would have expected wool to look. "Is it?"

"And rooing during travel is an enormous hassle. Not least of which because one must pack the wool in the wagons before washing them, and who wants that kind of stench?" The question was hypothetical, as Yirei continued briskly, "Now you can learn how to roo sheep yourself. It's very simple. A child could do it, but all the children are busy, and you are not."

"We are almost certain that is the wrong word," Zheru said. He moved his boot to let the ram rip at the tuft of grass he had been standing on. "One herds sheep, or breeds sheep, or shears sheep..."

"Some sheep are sheared. It's a terrible bother, and dulls blades better used for other purposes. I won't exchange stock with anyone who raises that sort." Yirei grabbed the ram by a horn, and simply ripped a lump of wool off its back. The animal continued its attack on the grass. "Rooing. See?"

"That _can't_ be efficient," Zheru said. He had a vague notion of sheep management, and woodcuts in his childhood books on agriculture showing elves holding up entire fleeces removed in one piece, while the sheared sheep frolicked merrily away. "Aren't there tools for this sort of work?"

"Yes. In Ethuverazhin, they're called 'hands,' and we have four available between us. Now lay that cloth out, so that we aren't dropping wool in the dirt."

The morning continued in this manner. Zheru learned a small amount about plucking wool from sheep, and a great deal more about holding them up by their curved horns so that Yirei could reach the wool on their bellies more easily. ("It doesn't damage them," Yirei said, when Zheru looked dubious at the instructions. "Surely you can lift that much." He could, though it made his arms ache.) They stripped wool from more than half the flock, while the rest were sent back to graze until their coats grew heavy enough to pull apart easily. Twice, Yirei drew a knife to make a notch on a sheep's horn. That, he explained, was for deciding what sheep to cull, when it was time to thin the herd through trade or butchery. The sheep that produced inferior wool year after year drew enough marks to stand out when he had to divide the herd.

"That is rather like writing," Zheru said. "Counting by tally marks, instead of written numbers, but still."

"It is nothing like writing," Yirei said. "Writing is transferable from one place to another. If I cut three marks in a piece of horn attached to no sheep, what does that mean? Nothing at all."

"It still means _three_ ," Zheru said, "even with the change of context."

"That isn't writing. That's counting. Now take those two corners of the cloth, so we can carry this all back."

The wool was an easier burden than any of the sheep it had been attached to, especially carried between two people. They laid the cloth out in bright late morning sunlight, next to the tent, and then Yirei gave Zheru a bucket and sent him to fetch water from the stream.

"Wouldn't it be easier to bring the wool to the water?" Zheru asked. "Rather than hauling it all this way." Much as he approved of the tents being set up before the incline down to the water--only an idiot would build on a flood plain, even in a land as dry as the steppes--he could tell already how much his arms would hurt from carrying bucket after bucket of water across that distance.

"Not for me," Yirei said. He sat down cross-legged beside the pile of wool. "Hurry along, then. We can have lunch after all of this is sorted and soaking."

"We feel our method would be more efficient."

Yirei smiled up at him brightly. "This is not a debate, Mneyem."

How far could that be pushed? Zheru wasn't certain, and didn't want to test the limits on a task as inoffensive as hauling water. Laborious, to be sure, but not particularly demeaning. He had carried buckets for the mules a few times, when fences made that necessary. It had been a convenient excuse to talk with Eikho.

He dipped the bucket into the stream, and wondered if she was worried about him. Or if she thought of him at all, after a few weeks' absence. He had only spent half a trading journey near her, and she'd made many of those. Likely she would wonder a little, and then remember him as entertaining for a time, then unfortunately disposed of. A little fonder than the memory he had of his stupid slow gelding, but with a similar ending.

Rasoo was at the stream as well, washing an infant. One of Credta's children, he assumed, though he wasn't certain if any of those were hers. There was no clear distinction between the children of the different mothers, if so. He offered her a smile. She only ducked her head, and focused on her work.

Maybe that was for the best. He hauled the full bucket back up the slope, to where Yirei had spread out the wool across the cloth, and was now busy picking through it for the sorts of unpleasantness that could become affixed to sheep.

"What do I do with the water now?" Zheru asked, as he would have asked Eikho, and realized a moment later than he had neglected formality in that question. He and Eikho had agreed on the use of intimate pronouns within a day or two of meeting, and now he had known Yirei for longer than he had ever spent with her.

"Wait a moment," Yirei said, not looking up. "Irlaav!"

She came out of the tent with a stack of bowls, and handed them to Zheru. "Propior ovibus quam sum non fiam," she told Yirei, and walked away.

"She's even less help than I am," Zheru said, and laid the bowls out near the wool. The large, shallow basins were all made of beaten copper, thin and light for their size. "Wool first, or water?"

"Water first," Yirei said. "There's little chance of felting from agitation at that temperature, but why risk it? I suppose we'll need..." He leaned over to consider the array of bowls. "...more water, but also more bowls. Go ask about for some to borrow. Edta and Athlid have stacks, but I suppose they'll have them all in use now."

"With their own wool?"

"Dyes, more likely. I trade them thread for dye, and we all do our own weaving. Try asking Credta first, then Hronthi."

That would be all the women in the camp, aside from the servant and those too young to be women as such. Zheru wondered if this sort of work was usually considered a woman's profession. He was not about to _ask_ , if only to set an example of the sorts of personal or awkward questions one simply didn't ask another person. Or perhaps it was only that Aicra had been absent all morning--hunting or scouting, if he had to guess at why--and asking Haathbe for favors was fraught, in the manner of family politics. "I have forgotten how to say 'bowl,' and 'borrow.'"

"I'll repeat them," Yirei said.

At some point, they would have to address each other directly again, and see where their pronouns had ended up, in matters of intimacy. Zheru was just as glad to not be the only one putting that off a while longer. He couldn't be a friend to the man, and didn't want to be a servant, but they were hardly strangers anymore. The barbarian language, with its maddening lack of proper formality on any words at all, would have let him put off the matter indefinitely. A pity that he didn't speak it well enough for that to be an option.

#

Lunch was brief, and Yirei appeared to feel that a day when everyone else was relaxing was the perfect time for serious work with all the components of fabric. Zheru was sent out to fetch back spun thread from all the other tents, and then from children scattered about camp and well beyond with their individual spindles carried about. It felt almost like freedom to walk for several minutes towards the cattle grazing in the distance, with no one at his side to watch that he stayed close.

An illusory sort of freedom. The flat land of the steppes allowed one to see a great distance, even if the occasional subtle dip or rise could hide things. And when he reached the cattle herd, and took the thread from the girl on horseback minding the cows there, all he could do was turn back to camp.

_Or I could run away into the grass, and die of thirst somewhat before I die of starvation,_ he thought, the voice in his head vicious as he walked toward the distant tents. _If Irlaav didn't ride me down and drag me back rather than let me get that far, then do...whatever barbarians do to runaway prisoners._ He turned a dry clod of earth to dust under the toe of his boot. _My sisters would try regardless, and take the risk. Mother should have sent one of them on this journey._

But of course she hadn't, and she couldn't have, and there was no use wishing, as he had once in a while when very small, that he could trade places with one of his sisters. Let Dameän join the military, or let Amedro take the university education he had been offered and refused, while he...what, married some man for a useful mercantile alliance, and then managed household finances? He couldn't see any pleasure in such a change. It wasn't that he had ever wanted the kind of life available to very proper young women of a very proper young house; it was only that it felt unfair, in a way, that he should have opportunities he didn't want, while his sisters wanted those same things and couldn't have them.

Dameän might have enjoyed being kidnapped by barbarians. She would certainly be better at escaping them.

He added the thread to the growing stack beside Yirei, who had set up a peculiar sort of folding loom; one end tied to the back of a wagon, the other end in Yirei's lap, and a narrow band of fabric being worked down the center. "See if Edta has any green thread," Yirei said, not looking up from his work.

"There are factories," Zheru said, "where this kind of weaving can be done ten times as fast, without any particular skill required from the worker. The same for turning wool to thread."

"Why would anyone wish to be less skilled, rather than more?" Yirei did glance his way at last, with a flash of fangs. "Green thread. Shall I repeat the words for the request?"

"I know that much," Zheru said, which was true. He had learned simple colors days ago, and had asked people for thread all afternoon.

He still stumbled over the words he spoke, half the time or more. It was maddening. The words were only _language_ , as anyone might learn from infancy, and yet the speech weighed down his tongue when he tried to execute simple sentences. The children laughed, sometimes, when he spoke near them, and laughed at him even when he didn't speak. As if they knew something he didn't, when all they knew was how to be barbarians.

And then Yirei had no more requests. The worst heat of the afternoon was finally on the ebb, and Zheru could sit down in the shade outside the tent to watch Yirei weave. The man's pale blue fingers moved rapidly across the loom, working thread into what had clearly become an actual pattern. White flowers with yellow dots at their centers marched along a band maybe two inches wide, against a background of teal. No, of blue and green thread worked together, to appear blended into one color from a distance. The barbarians surely had no chemical dyes, nor the ones that required trade with Barizhan, like the purple made out of tiny shells from the sea floor.

"Thinking," Yirei said, his hands not slowing at all across the loom. "What about?"

"Assembly lines," Zheru said.

Yirei did pause then, and glanced back at him. "Assembly lines? I know the words, but not the two together."

"In factories," Zheru said, "it's..." He stood up, and drew a line in the dirt with the toe of his boot. "There are machines, but there are also types of production where everything is done by hand. Putting together mechanical pens, let's say. So the workers line up along this long table, and each one has a bin of parts. Here, the pen barrels. Here, the pen caps. Here, the tubes down the center, or the little spring, or the button to press..." He made marks along the line. "So this person simply takes barrels from the bin and lays them on the table to his right. The next person down takes up the barrel with the tube he took from his own bin, and fits them together, and sets the two pieces together to his right. So on down the table. It moves more quickly because no one has to get up and walk around looking for another bin, or remember the order of all the pieces. Each worker does one task over and over again, throughout the day, and the pens are made much faster than if the same number of workers all did the full assembly on their own for the same amount of time."

Yirei snorted. "Elves are very strange. Do they enjoy picking up a tube and setting it to their right, all day, day after day?"

"Rather more than I enjoyed running about camp asking separate people for thread," Zheru said, with more confidence than he felt. It wasn't as if he had ever asked a factory worker how they liked the job. "Here, there are several people making thread, one person weaving the thread, two people dyeing it and making dyes for other people, I suppose, with other sheep and other wool and...it's all very inefficient."

"Everyone is clothed," Yirei said. "Everyone is fed, and there's time yet for other matters than mere survival." He nodded toward a spot across the camp where Hronthi was teaching one of the smaller children, not her own, the steps of a simple dance. "What harm is this inefficiency doing us, Mneyem?"

Zheru sat down on the ground again. "Given the apparent lack of currency, perhaps none." He brushed out the lines he had drawn with the heel of his palm. "Land like this would never be farmland, and it's not as if anyone would want to establish an industrial center out here."

"Why would we want farms or elvish industry?"

"Because nations require an agricultural and manufacturing base to..." Zheru set his hands on his knees. _To make war in any sort of useful manner, in this day and age._ "Oh, it doesn't matter. Roads have to come before any of that, and I've already heard your opinion on those."

"So _formal_ ," Yirei said, light as ever. "Time to work on thy verbs."

#

Between one recitation of verb forms and the next, Yirei folded up his loom, and stood. The sun was making its way toward the horizon, though evening and the night's chill were still a long way off. "Enough of that for the day," he said.

"Merciful goddesses," Zheru muttered, and levered himself upright. Sitting for so long made his muscles ache, even if he preferred it in the moment to more walking. "What next? Tailoring around adverbs?"

"Maybe on another day." Yirei clapped him on the shoulder. "Down to the river, Mneyem. Thou'rt filthy and couldst stand to change that state."

Zheru's ears snapped back. "We are hardly responsible for that."

"True enough. As I am responsible, I mean to repair the difficulty. Or, as the case may be, wash it away." Yirei smiled at him, already moving down the slope toward the water. "Take offense so easily as that, and thou wilt find my sister teasing you without mercy. Learn a little more control over thy own reactions."

Zheru did not dignify that with a response. He picked his way around the bushes that lined the edge of the stream, taking care not to let any snag his clothes. With a single set of clothing to his name, he couldn't afford to let any be damaged. The dust of walking behind cattle had done nothing good for the fabric's appearance, but it was still largely whole.

"I suppose thou must be accustomed to it," Yirei said, pulling his shirt off to hang it over a bush. "I have met elves in greater number, now and again, and seen how expressive you all are. Do we seem dull in turn, to compose ourselves better?"

"You're not better composed," Zheru said. He stilled when Yirei grabbed his shoulder, and then held that position as he was used as a solid point so that the other man could take off his boots more easily. "Your ears move less, but you smile more, and when people begin shouting at each other, there's no need to watch faces to know what they're feeling."

"True enough. Take off thy clothes, Mneyem. They'll wash better separately than on thy body." Yirei removed his own trousers by way of demonstration, a hand on Zheru's shoulder keeping the two of them connected for the process.

Zheru fixed his gaze on the enormous stones standing on the other side of the stream. "In public?"

"Elves are built much like anyone else. What is there to hide?" Yirei flung the rest of his clothes over the dry branches of the bushes, and waded into the stream. "Surely thou hast removed clothing before others before. I have seen it done by others of thy kind."

"The poor may do as they like," Zheru said, feeling the heat rise through his ears again, "but it is hardly...proper."

"Neither is it proper to stand about on the shore covered in dust when the water is right here," Yirei said. He beckoned with one hand. "Come along, Mneyem, before I call my sister to throw thee in."

"...you wouldn't."

Yirei showed his fangs when he smiled.

Zheru voiced a few of those phrases it was quite improper to know, but quietly. He undid two buttons to let himself pull the shirt off without unfastening the rest, then sat down to remove his boots. At least the children who had been playing in the stream earlier were all in other parts of the camp now, having exhausted the novelty of the water for the time being. That was not much comfort when the camp lay up on the banks, and people wandered past constantly. It was a long distance from the privacy of a bath taken behind screens or in a separate room. Still, what could one expect of people who let their children wander around shirtless as often as not?

"My tutor was like this as well, early on," Yirei said, waist-deep in the water and scrubbing his hands clean within the lazy flow of the stream. "She learned better in time, though she never did like removing her clothing when men were about. I can't imagine how elves can be such shy and private people, when they cluster in vast quantities at every opportunity."

Zheru debated stepping into the stream with trousers on, and being forced to wear them wet into the cold evening, as opposed to going naked. Neither route was particularly appealing, but...it wasn't so very different from the casual disarray of hunting lodges, was it? None of which had ever descended into this level of nudity, or he never would have been allowed to visit them, but certainly men might take off their shirts to butcher deer in the summer heat without raising any objections from their peers. He stripped the rest of his clothing off as hastily as he could, and hurried into the water just as fast. It was cool, but not the cold of snowmelt. Rain-fed streams, then, from wherever in the distance rain actually fell.

"How didst thou like it?" Yirei asked. "In the cities, with so many people so near, and never a direction to look without buildings full of more people blocking thy view."

"Quite well." The water was, despite the embarrassment, a profound relief against skin. Zheru sat down and began scrubbing clean as best he could without any soap. "How do you like the steppes, with nothing of interest to see for miles in every direction, and no one new to speak to from one day to the next, nor any way to escape the people around you if you've become tired of them?"

"Quite well." Yirei ducked under the water for a long moment. When he surfaced again, his hair hung in damp blue-black strands across his shoulders just as it had for his sister the day before. "Birds to the air, worms to the earth, fish to the water, and antelope to the grass. Each considers their own home superior to all others. Still, a man may become accustomed to wherever he is, despite his origins."

Zheru thought of his father's pet bird, brought from the land of lion-girls across the ocean in a trade journey, which sat so nicely on an offered wrist when it wasn't shut up in its cage. Amedro tried to set it free, once; but all it did was flutter around the courtyard, green feathers fluffed up in distress, until the one of the servants discovered what she'd done and ran out to rescue the poor creature. It spent every winter huddling miserably in a corner of its cage, no matter that they set the cage in the warmest room of the house. Some things weren't made to live far from home.

And then there were mules, who could pull a wagon from Celvaz in the far north down to the southern coasts of Barizhan without being much bothered by the change of scenery. Zheru waded deeper into the water and tried to put it all out of his mind. "Is there a part of the steppes that's more home to you? Or is it all the same, from end to end?"

"The eastern portion," Yirei said. "My mother's family came from the west, and she went back to them years ago."

"Divorced? I thought she had died."

"Oh, she's too stubborn to die," Yirei said cheerfully. "I imagine that when I am seventy years old, she will still be offering serene wisdom to the women around her and working embroidery. She was always a very mild woman, mind. Nothing like my father."

Zheru tried to work the grit out from beneath his fingernails. What he would have given for a proper bath brush, much less good soap. Even _bad_ soap. "I am imagining a man exactly like Irlaav. How close am I?"

"Rather close, though Irlaav isn't so pointed as my father was. I suppose it comes from never having been to war. She's done raids, of course, but those are far from the same experience." Yirei sprawled backward into the water, spreading his arms out to float on his back. The stream's current moved so slowly that he could stay in one place if he liked. "Maybe that will change before she becomes so bored with ordinary raids as to do something foolish."

Zheru flicked an ear at that thought without quite meaning to. "Do you expect war to break out again?"

"When are we ever not at war, with where the elves have set up camp?" Yirei turned his face toward the lowering sun. "There will always be another opportunity to retake what was ours, and when we have retaken it, surely thy people will respond in the same manner. War doesn't end when either side of it still stands. There are far too many elves to ever run out of those, and we are too established in this place to be overrun entirely, even if we have to retreat to the west now and again. Hast thou ever thought it could go differently?"

"I have never given it much thought," Zheru said, "one way or another."

"What a life thou must have had." Yirei pivoted neatly in the water to lay his feet on the bed of the stream again. "Wash thy hair, Mneyem."

Zheru blinked. Yes, of course it needed washing, and he had no idea how to proceed. By the time he had grown old enough to not have the nursery maid helping him bathe, his hair had been long enough to require the services of an edocharis to manage. Buttons he could manage, but hair had never been his responsibility. "Yes," he said, rather dubiously.

Yirei looked him up and down. "At times, I really do wonder," he said, and hooked Zheru's legs out from under him with a foot.

The water was colder when it covered him, and deeper where Zheru fell than he had realized. He resurfaced, sputtering. "That was a wicked trick, Yirei."

"Stealth and trickery will get me further than a pitched battle," Yirei said. "Now that thou'rt entirely wet, the rest will be easier. As with many things, starting is the difficult part."

Zheru wished, for an instant, that he had sharp teeth to show in response, rather than pinned ears and a lack of suitably angry vocabulary. He settled for silence as he dragged hands through his hair, and rinsed it several more times to achieve what cleanliness he could. While he was busy with that, Yirei took Zheru's clothing from the shore, and flung it into the water near him.

"We are not a washerwoman," Zheru snapped, catching at his shirt before it could drift downstream.

"A washerwoman," Yirei said, "would have skill at washing. Shall I teach thee how?"

"Is that an honest question, or will you do the same however we answer?"

"An honest question," Yirei said. "Thou art the man who will wear the clothes afterward, however clean they have become, or not become."

Zheru bundled his soaked clothing together, and kept his ears up. "Such opportunities for new knowledge we have been offered. Do teach us, then, if you please."

#

He was cold, as afternoon became evening, in damp clothes and with damp hair hanging over his shoulders. (Not down his back, as it ought, nor tied away, but in untidy tangled strands since Yirei had taken away the cords that had once kept it together.) His clothes were, if nothing else, quick to dry; the sun-warmed stone had helped in that regard, and the blazing sun of the steppes for the rest. For once, he was reluctant to enter the tent for the preparation and serving of dinner. The shade was no help in staying warm.

"Sit," Yirei said, once the usual pot was simmering atop the stove. "No, over here, where I am."

Zheru settled himself on the floor, tucking his bare feet beneath him. The sensation of being clean, rather than tracking more dust inside with ever step, was worth something. "We should have gone down to the stream this morning, when there was all day left to dry."

"Before I knew how long the wool would take? Besides, thou wouldst have been surrounded by people in the river, and caught fire from all the red rising in you."

The thought brought on another blush. Zheru looked straight ahead as Yirei sat behind him, and tried to think of less embarrassing things. "It is not a river. It is a _stream_. Rivers are marked on maps, and cannot be crossed without effort or watercraft."

"A river," Yirei said, "is any running water which is there every time one returns to the same place looking for it." He put a hand to the back of Zheru's head. "Thy hair tangles if I so much as look at it. Hold still. This might hurt a little."

The comb Yirei used was made of dark brown horn, polished to a glow and carved with a line of running horses across the top. The very first tug it made had Zheru wincing. "We would like to keep _some_ of our hair, Yirei."

"So formal, Mneyem."

Zheru set his hands on his knees, fingers curved down. One of his sister's tutors had taught him to do that when books were being read to the three of them, to keep from fidgeting. "I am rather fond of what you have left me."

Yirei took the hair up in his hand, and began working on the ends of it instead. That didn't hurt at all, though the lack of weight was still strange. "What will it take thee to call me by the pronouns thou ought? Or should we speak in my language entirely, where thou never needst choose?"

"I address my family and my friends as thou," Zheru said, "when not in public. Intimate relationships and intimate settings. You are neither friend nor family to me." He bent his head forward as Yirei worked the comb further up. "Is it not so?"

"Friendship is an odd thing to quantify so exactly, as if one either is or isn't, thou or you. My tutor addressed me as thou. She was a servant, and thus family to me, as much as my sister or father, or as a wife would be, had I one."

"She was not a servant," Zheru said. "Servants are given wages, and may take up service elsewhere, or nowhere at all, as they please. Did she choose to stay with you all those years?"

"She ran away, once," Yirei said. "Hold still, this knot is tricky. My father brought her back, and took a finger from her to warn her against trying again. One of the smallest. I cried more than she did, over that warning. I was already fond of her, and I have never enjoyed seeing anyone hurt. It's sometimes necessary, though, isn't it? She only tried the once, so it all ended well enough."

All of Zheru's fingers seemed entirely fragile on his knees. "Edrethelma V," he said, "was known as Edrethelma the Reformer, rather than the Builder as his father and his son, not because he neither started nor completed the construction of the Untheileneise Court, but because he forbade the buying and selling of serfs within Ethuveraz. It was in some ways a mere formality, as the buying and selling of leases came to about the same thing, with how serfs were connected to the land, but a great deal of subsequent law was built on his proclamation."

"We are not in Ethuveraz," Yirei said, with a light emphasis on the plural.

"That depends on who is drawing the maps." Zheru lifted his chin up. "Regardless, we are not friends."

"Family, then."

"I have only one brother, and he is not _you_."

"I never said brothers, but family. Quite different propositions." Yirei rested an elbow on Zheru's shoulder as he worked the comb through another tangle. "We eat from the same bowls and drink from the same cups. We sleep in the same tent and follow the same herds. What is that, if not family?"

"I had been wondering," Zheru said, "where your cousin acquired those Celvazeise bowls. The beaten copper ones with the wool soaking in them, out among the ones of pottery and tin. Do you trade with Celvaz, or raid them as well?"

"Thy changes of subject are as reliable as thy ears, to see when a conversation has made thee unhappy." Yirei tweaked the tip of Zheru's ear, not ungently. "We trade with them in the late summer, before turning south for the winter. Horses, mainly, but they give us worked metal or wood, and we give them meat or wool. They are a taciturn people. I know their language, but not well."

"Perhaps you should have stolen one of them, to practice it more."

Yirei laughed, and dragged the comb through Zheru's hair, scalp to scattered ends. "What would I do with two of thee? One is quite enough to keep me entertained. There. Hold still a moment longer, and we'll have dinner."

"You say 'hold still' as if I am about to bolt at any second. I am not that stupid, Yirei."

"Not stupid," Yirei said, binding Zheru's hair in a single short tail in two places. "More like a nervous horse, shying away from bridle and saddle." He lifted the tail of hair, and kissed the nape of Zheru's neck, as if this were an ordinary second step of combing. Then he took a strip of woven cloth--the one with the white flowers, that he'd been weaving in the afternoon--and tied it around Zheru's neck, knotting it over that spot in the back. "There. Now when other families join us, they will know thou art properly bridled."

Zheru touched the cloth at his throat. "Collared." It would be quite simple to untie the band, and quite foolish of him to try.

"With whichever words thou shouldst prefer." Yirei stood up, his hands on Zheru's shoulders to help him rise. "Go find Irlaav, and tell her that dinner is ready. Thou knowest that sentence by now without my help."


	11. Chapter 11

Zheru had never quite realized how many steps were required between acquiring the materials for fabric and the final clothing product. He had pictured it, in a vague sort of way, as a three step process. One removed the wool from sheep, silk thread from cocoons, flax from fields, or what not. Then one delivered these materials to factories, which turned them into cloth. Finally, tailors were deployed, and there was clothing at the far end, with whatever weight of buttons, embroidery, and so forth had to be added to the fabric itself. Factories were complicated, much like kitchens, and required exactly as much input from him to do their work.

Having no factories nearby, he was instead required to help Yirei with the whole messy business of turning the wool removed from sheep into something suitable for being spun into thread. There were rounds of soaking it and pouring out the water, and thus buckets to be hauled up from the stream. Then the wool had to be fluffed up, one tiny cloud of brown at a time, to remove any lingering debris. And then the _combing_.

"Have you considered simply _not_ making new clothing, and moving somewhere warm for the winter?" he asked Yirei. He shook his hand, and stretched out aching fingers. "Or coming to a trade agreement with a textile manufacturer. I could procure quite favorable terms for you."

"Translate that into my language," Yirei said, not looking up from his work, "and we can discuss trade agreements."

Of course he hadn't the words to say that properly. The language came more easily to the ear than it once had, but still he lost track of what was being said as soon as anyone spoke quickly, or spoke over another person, or sang, even aside from not knowing enough words. And it came far more clumsily to his mouth.

Zheru bent his head over his own work, and was glad, in a way, that Yirei would leave it at that. Nothing had changed, precisely, in how matters went inside the tent, neither at meals nor at night. And yet the change from travel to setting up camp for days at a time in one location did make everything feel different. There was more time for leisure (despite all the wool processing) and more time for conversations that drifted through various subjects, to various degrees of comfort.

He felt odd when either of Irlaav or Yirei looked at him. Or maybe only when they looked at him in certain ways. The ambiguity of it bothered him almost as much as the feeling, because it was neither fear nor irritation. Either of _those_ feelings would have made sense, for each sibling respectively. Or possibly both emotions for both. Instead he wanted to ask them what they meant, and have it done with. Whatever the it was.

Or maybe it was all in his head. The megrims of a young man who had been entirely accustomed to doing as he liked, finding himself taking orders from other people time and again. He tried that idea on for size: that all he felt was frustration at being told to do this or that, or the possibility of being so ordered about.

The idea didn't fit. It made a pleasant story to explain matters, but he knew that old trick of his own, as he had used it every time a friendship or flirtation turned in a direction he didn't like. Simple to make up a story that cast him as the hero and others as those in the wrong. Simple, and not the truth. He wasn't quite foolish enough to not be able to tell the difference between the stories he told himself for comfort and what he had actually observed, even if he wasn't certain _what_ he was observing.

What was a little more uncertainty in a very uncertain life? He could add that to the long list of barbaric customs that made little sense to him. Their clothing, their food, their _speech_ , the way they held their ears. Their sleeping arrangements, for that matter, piling the inhabitants of each tent into a cluster together, instead of giving people some privacy and space of their own.

And yet in the cold nights, when he woke from unsettled dreams and remembered that he was a very long ways from any sort of civilization, it was a relief to have other bodies sprawled against and over him. The warmth and the sound of breathing provided reminders that he was not entirely alone.

Then there was a night that he woke to a sound he couldn't identify. He thought muzzily, _The cattle are moving,_ and then, _Someone is screaming._ The second idea jerked him into wakefulness. As did an elbow jammed against his ribs. Irlaav and Yirei were both awake and moving, and Irlaav did not take any great care to avoid disturbing other people as she pulled herself upright. She said something under her breath that sounded impolite, and then more distinctly, "Nazhcreis."

"Or a bear," Yirei said. The two of them spoke the barbarian language, but animals had been a very early lesson in vocabulary.

Irlaav braced herself one-handed on her brother's shoulder, the better to pull on her boots quickly. "Too southern for bears."

"Only because you--" Yirei left off that response as his sister strode out of the tent, grabbing her knife belt on the way. He snorted, and leaned back on his hands. In the darkness of the tent, his hair made a black frame around his pale face. "There is an animal among the sheep," he said, switching to clipped Ethuverazhin.

"So I gathered." Zheru sat up himself, unwilling to move further out from beneath the blanket in the night chill. "Shouldn't we go help her?"

"Three people throwing spears about in the dark is worse than one," Yirei said. "Besides, thou couldst be unlucky, and actually find the nazhcreis."

"It's a sort of hunting cat, isn't it? Rather like a lion."

"A lion is rather like a nazhcreis." Despite what he had said about leaving Irlaav be, Yirei was still watching the tent's exit. Outside, the sheep bleated unhappily, but nothing was shrieking anymore. "Best not to make its acquaintance."

"I have gone hunting before," Zheru said.

Yirei stood up. "Stay here."

"I only mean that--"

" _Stay_ , Mneyem," Yirei said, his hand gesture a white movement in the darkness, and left the tent.

Zheru waited where he was told, and hated himself for it. The camp was coming to life around him. Not the hubbub of a house woken up in the middle of the night by some emergency, but a quieter sort of reaction, flowing from one tent to another. Here someone striding briskly toward the flocks, there a murmur of distant voices, and across camp a very small child sobbing sleepily until quieted again. Zheru tucked his knees up to his chest, and stared through the dark tent. He hadn't so much as a table knife at hand. The children who spun thread were better armed than he.

_My sisters walk the streets of Cetho better armed, when they care to walk, and I would trade my pocket watch for my mother's letter opener._ His ear twitched irritably. _None of which would give me more than false comfort against a wildcat of the steppes, so do I have any true reason for complaint?_ He laid his chin on his arms, and waited.

Yirei returned within the quarter hour, limping no more than usual. His hands were clean, but damp, when he laid one on Zheru's shoulder. Recently washed in the river, from whatever he had done out among the flock. "Go back to sleep, Mneyem."

"Where's your sister?"

"Speaking with Aicra." Yirei sat down, and slid beneath the blanket again. "Go to _sleep_ , Mneyem, thou'rt no help with chatter at this time of night."

Zheru bit back other questions he had meant to ask. What did he care about sheep, in any case? He lay down with his back to Yirei, and could not fall asleep again until Irlaav had returned.

#

In the gray of earliest dawn, Zheru put on his boots and followed Irlaav out of the tent. Yirei was still quite pointedly curled up beneath the blanket, asleep or pretending to be.

Zheru gathered the tack she needed for her favorite horse. It was help he offered without comment, and she accepted it in the same way. When the saddle was cinched and she began selecting spears, he put together the words he was sure of in her language, and said, "Take me with you."

"On a nazhcreis hunt? Don't be a fool."

"I know...this." He couldn't find all the words, couldn't put them in his mouth even when he could recognize them. "I have done this before."

"Against your forest antelope, maybe, but you've never fought a nazhcreis." Irlaav patted him on the head, her teeth flashing white into a quick grin. "Go back to sleep, little lamb."

"I can _do_ this, Irlaav! Why won't you..." He broke off halfway through the sentence, trying to find his syntax. "Why can't I help?"

She let out a short huff of breath, and turned to face him directly. "Little lambs with blunt teeth don't go hunting," she said. "Nor do servants who keep eyeing the horizon get to ride horses, or take weapons in hand."

He had no good answer for any of what she said, except to repeat, "I can do this."

"If you wanted to join this hunt," she said, with something akin to sympathy in her voice, "you should've been born in a different place." She hoisted herself into the saddle, and rode away without looking back. Aicra was waiting for her, already mounted, and the two of them together put Zheru in mind of a not so distant time when he had followed them on foot, his hands bound.

He watched them go, all the same. The memory wasn't so sharp as it had once been.

He wondered, after the riders had faded from sight, if his sisters had felt the same when he left the house for hunting trips with friends. Maybe not. They had their own amusements, and their own friends. What they had wanted, and couldn't have, wasn't encompassed by hunting.

#

"Thou'rt sulking," Yirei said, some half hour later. A sliver of sunlight from the ceiling's hole lit up the blue gloss of his hair spread across a pillow. "Before breakfast, even, so I suppose I ought to get up and feed thee."

"Make no effort on my account," Zheru said. He sat cross-legged on the floor himself, as he had been since he gave up on staring at the horizon. As if the staring ever did him an ounce of good.

"Sulking comes from too much thought and too little action." Yirei rolled out from under the blanket, and yawned. "Or wanting what thou canst not have. Fold up the bedding, and I'll get breakfast for the both of us."

Zheru did as he was told. The blanket snapped in a satisfying way under his hands when he shook it out before folding. "Don't you wish you were out there?" he asked. "With your sister, or instead of your sister."

"Near those claws? No, I have no such desire. I knew long ago not to dream of glory as a warrior or a hunter. I am, however, an accomplished weaver, and my flock produces good wool."

"No one tells stories about weavers." Zheru tucked the blanket and pillows back in their usual spot, and went to gather a few cups for breakfast. "Except in stories for children, and those are all meant to be amusing. Charming little tales, not the sort anyone wants to emulate."

"All this talk of operas and novels," Yirei said, "and thy language has not one good story about a weaver or shepherd? The failing is in the language, not the wool. Who features in the stories thou hast heard?"

Zheru sat down near the stove, leaning back on his hands. "Soldiers, of course. Princes. Hunters, when one wants a virtuous but low-born hero. Pirates and sailors, smugglers and merchants, depending on the sort of novel. Courtiers for stories of politics and tragedy, sell-swords for stories of adventure. Sometimes a hero has parents who are weavers, but then he leaves home in the first chapter, and they're never mentioned again, unless he sends home wealth gained in his adventures."

"I assure thee," Yirei said, "that without weavers, none of those people would get very far." He passed Zheru a bowl of eggs and cheese. "Just as we would have nothing to eat without anyone milking my cousin's herd, or his children gathering eggs and herbs out in the field while thou and I comb wool. Surely thou hast stories of clever shepherds, or the midwife who delivered the moon."

"Oh, well, myths," Zheru said. "Those are for children, or clerics."

"Thus a great deal of the world is consigned to other people." Yirei sat down across from him with his own bowl. "How small that makes the bit of the world left to thee. I would say that all elves are content with very small portions of the world, to sit in one part of it forever, or to spend their lives moving a tube from their left to their right, except that they will keep trying to steal the steppes from us. Do you want all the world, or a small part of it?"

"I can scarcely speak to the foreign policy decisions made by government officials," Zheru said.

"I don't see why not. When we make decisions about what to do with you, everyone who wants to can speak up." Yirei flashed his fangs. "It is a very loud process."

"Like parliament," Zheru said. Despite everything, he found he had an excellent appetite, especially with how rare a treat eggs had become to him. "We send representatives to argue over these matters in a building set aside for that purpose."

"So, there, thou dost have a voice in what thy people do regarding other peoples."

"In a manner of speaking," Zheru said dubiously. "My house's trade, and our vote in the trade association, does more to direct politics than any vote I cast for a single man in the House of Commons."

"And what does thy house believe about thy people's foreign policy?"

"That peaceful relations with our neighbors are good for trade, and that well-protected towns have the spare coin to buy luxury goods which ravaged towns cannot afford."

"Such placid intentions! Yet thou wouldst ride off and fight a nazhcreis."

"There is nothing unpeaceful about hunting," Zheru said. He gathered up the bowls and cups. "It's what--the sort of thing men do, when they're adults, if they have the leisure and connections."

"Connections," Yirei said. He sprawled out on the floor, resting on his elbows. "Social connections, I suppose? Why would anyone need those to go hunting?"

"Because all the best hunting is on estates owned by someone, or licensed by the nobility who mind that land, and it is a great trouble to leave a city and go apply for a hunting permit in some township a day's travel away, when one could simply have a friend who can give an invitation to a party at their hunting lodge. Which they are more inclined to give if they hope in turn to gain some discount, or forgiveness for debt, among the merchants."

"All these divisions," Yirei said. "Nobles, merchants, factory workers. It seems like a bother to keep them in order."

"One can hardly have a large society without some kind of order and division." Zheru found he had run out of things to put away, and was only pacing about the tent. He dropped down to a stretch of carpet near Yirei. "We can't all be merchants, any more than all of your people can be weavers."

"Not all, though knowing how to manage thread is useful even to a warrior. Or to a hunter, after the nazhcreis has put claws through her jacket, yes?" Yirei nudged his knee with a bare foot. "Sulking, again. I never would have taken thee for such an ardent hunter. Thou seldom speakst of it, in all thy talk of opera, novels, newspapers, coffee... Oh, I have certainly forgotten some. Why art thou so sure hunting is a true passion?"

"I have been hunting since I turned 16." Zheru rubbed the spot on his finger where a signet ring should have been. "Not everyone worth meeting lurks about opera house foyers or coffee houses."

"Some are found in far more distant locations," Yirei said, agreeable and amused in one breath. "Who was worth meeting, by thy estimation?"

"Any number of people," Zheru said, "the names of whom would mean nothing to you."

"Ah, give me one. I will pretend to be impressed by it, as thou likest."

Zheru lay down on his side, so long as he was being allowed the leisure. "One. Well. Osmer Raiis Coromar, that was someone worth knowing."

"Raiis? Now that is a mouthful."

"Says _Yirei_ , with your..." Zheru waved a hand. "Those things your vowels do, when they fake being consonants. Raiis has an entirely normal name, I assure you."

"And now let us pretend I am very impressed at him. Her?"

"Him, of course, with that name. Though he did have a sister, Raio. His family was not particularly creative about naming. And you needn't pretend to be impressed. He was no more important than any other man with a baron for a grandfather but no baron's heir for a father."

"Yet his name is the one thou chose," Yirei said, "so let me be impressed at him. Tell me about him." He widened his eyes, all pretense of rapt attention. "Go on."

"Wicked man," Zheru said, without much heat to it. Yirei teased him no worse than older sisters ever had, and tied him up rather less often on the whole. "Raiis was...oh, very impressive when I was sixteen, to be sure. He was always dressed in the height of fashion, but the sort of fashion one wears for hunting, not in court. So instead of looking like a courtier, he looked very much like the one who knew best what he was doing, in the entire group of hunters, even when there were men older than him about, ones who had more illustrious titles. They never wore such sharp coat as he did, nor wore them so lightly, as if it was nothing to speak of. He had this one coat with buttons cut from the antlers of a great stag he had brought down himself--and he had taken a scar in the process, too, because he was never one to hang back when it was time to close in on a beast."

"Thou didst admire him," Yirei said, "whether or not anyone else did."

"To be sure. He would tell these stories of other hunts, or ones his father had been on, and he always told the stories well. A great many hunters will tell stories, you know, but most of them make it a dull account, and end by saying, 'Oh, you should have been there, then you would understand.' Raiis could tell a story so that it felt as if one had been there, and saw it all happen." Zheru laid his head on his arm. "He was dashing and handsome and accomplished and clever and brave, and I was very new to being an adult. I wanted to be exactly like him."

"Ah," Yirei said.

"Ah, what?"

"The sort of man one follows about," Yirei said, "hoping for a smile or a nod, and every time he looked at thee with a word of approval, or even an implication of such, thou couldst feel it right...there." He leaned over to tap a finger to Zheru's stomach, and drew up. "All the way up to here, in thy chest. Warm down below, and tangled up above, as if thou hadst swallowed wool, or thorns."

"I suppose. Yes. It was rather like that. My brother said that I made a fool of myself, trailing about after him, but that most boys did when they were young." Zheru smiled at the memory. "Then he said that he ought to be pleased that I was trailing about behind someone respectable, who could convince me to pay more attention to equitation lessons, and mind how I held a spear, rather than panting after some actress or opera singer. I think he did that, when he was my age, though not for long."

"Why is the one more pleasing than the other?"

"Because there is no scandal in being a bit foolish around some respectable young man, when one is a respectable young man as well, as opposed to the potential for, ah, difficulties, around women, respectable or otherwise."

Yirei tilted his head to one side. "By difficulties, dost thou mean pregnancy? Qega did tell me of how awkwardly thy people manage such things."

"We manage _perfectly_ well," Zheru said. "No doubt thy--" He rubbed his mouth, and stared up at the roof of the tent. "No doubt your people manage it all more reasonably, you would say."

"I would say. Every people believes their own customs best. Qega told me that, too, whenever I thought her stories of elves particularly silly." Yirei sat up, pushing himself closer to Zheru across the broad rug they shared. "Here, I'll tell thee a story of my own foolishness, when I was a new adult. That would be a fair return for thy story, wouldn't it?"

"Suddenly you have a concern for fair exchange," Zheru said dryly. All the same, he waved a go-head to the other man; he had no taste for another argument about the ethics of raids that morning. "Do tell me, if you would."

"I'll cure thee of formality yet," Yirei said. "Well, then. Hast thou heard of a man whose use-name is Taiyesh?"

"I had never heard the names of any barbarians before I met your sister."

"Perhaps thou wouldst like this one. He is..." Yirei made a lazy gesture with one hand. "Oh, he is what he was, I suppose, and when I was a child, I thought he had lit up the stars in the sky himself. There are a great many stories about his cunning in war and courage in battle, and at least half of them must be true."

"Not your age, then?"

"No, a little older than my sister. Close enough that she would complain when our father accepted him in battle, and wouldn't take her, until she was convinced to stay behind to defend those of us who could not well defend ourselves."

"I am shocked to hear that anyone has ever convinced Irlaav to do something she didn't want to do."

"Rarely," Yirei said. "Very rarely. However, we were not discussing my _sister_ , but Taiyesh, whose name I imagine thou wouldst have some difficulty pronouncing, given how half the vowels fall out of thy mouth."

"It is scarcely my fault that your language insists on gluing the sounds together," Zheru said. "So tell me about this man, mighty warrior that he was."

"That he is. Well. I became an adult, at a time when the witches had advised us to focus on preparation rather than attack, and it came to pass that he joined our group for a time. Or one might say that we joined him, as he had as many personal attendants and constant followers as could make up this entire camp. Full of pride in my new status, I did my best to join this crowd of followers. Anyone would have laughed to see me so, limping about behind them, wide-eyed as a child and sure I was a man. They were almost always polite enough to not laugh in my face, though, and I considered that acceptance enough."

Zheru flicked his ears back to a neutral position. "Do you think I looked like that, following Raiis about?"

"How should I know, Mneyem?" Yirei patted him on the knee. "Not everything is about thee and thy worries. I do think that I admired him as much as thou didst thy young lord. What happened to him, in the end? Did he return thy interest?"

"He married," Zheru said, "and had far less time for hunting, having been given care of a country estate much less convenient to Cetho. It isn't an anecdote, with a proper ending. What about your Taiiësh?"

"Taiyesh."

"That _is_ what I said."

"Isn't, in the slightest." Yirei tapped him on the nose. "We'll work on thy pronunciation today. My Taiyesh had a little pity on me, and took me into his tent for a while, and I was enormously pleased until I overheard what he called me to his friends when I wasn't about. A valuable lesson." He smiled with all his sharp teeth showing. "When he asked my sister to join him in his next raid, she said no, so that was a valuable lesson for him as well, perhaps. Or perhaps he learned nothing at all from it. The last I heard, he was styling himself a uniter of clans. Perhaps he has learned more circumspection."

"That does not sound like a circumspect man," Zheru said. "Though I can see why you wanted to imitate him."

"I didn't want to _imitate_ him," Yirei said, "I wanted to do the sorts of things with him that Qega did not give me the proper vocabulary for, in thy language. Besides, the distance between the two desires is easily crossed, sometimes without realizing one has crossed over."

"The desires are nothing alike. I had no interest in--that sort of thing, with Raiis."

"How art thou so certain?"

It was the sort of question that had a clear and obvious answer, and still made Zheru hesitate while he tried to put the matter into words. One might as well ask what color the sky was on a sunny day, or who ruled the Elflands. Some things, everyone knew. "Because I am--not averse to the company of women, and not the sort of person who is."

"A reductive sort of definition," Yirei said, "which is bound to confuse all sorts of matters. A person can want all sorts of people to take them into a not particularly marital embrace, though not necessarily more than one or two of them at a given moment, and--" He covered his mouth with his hands, which did nothing to hide his laughter. "Thou art red as blood, pet."

"I am _not_ ," Zheru said, well aware from the burning sensation across his face that he was lying, and not even lying well.

"To the tips of thy ears." Yirei seized one by way of example, his fingers cool on the hot skin. "It is a wonder elves can ever hold a conversation from beginning to end without fleeing in embarrassment."

"Some people," Zheru said stiffly, "are rather less proper."

"Some people have no idea what they want," Yirei said. He took both of Zheru's ears in his hands, and kissed him.

Zheru made an undignified sort of noise of--he was almost certain it was a noise of _surprise_ , though in perfect honesty he could not claim to be entirely surprised, given the line of conversation. His skin felt all hot and cold at once, and Yirei's hands were cool against his ears and temples, and it was--something he did not quite have the vocabulary for, in either language.

_Improper,_ at the very least. Zheru fell back onto his elbows and stared owlishly up at Yirei, at a loss for commentary.

Unlike his sister, Yirei let him fall away. "Thou art clever enough in some ways," Yirei said kindly, "and a complete fool in others. Maybe all those holes elves put in their ears lets the sense drain out of their heads." He stood up, and offered Zheru a hand. "Come along, then. The chores won't wait for us any longer."

Zheru took the hand offered, and kept quiet. He could not think of any response, all the rest of the morning, that would have sufficed.

#

Irlaav and Aicra returned early in the evening, the two of them on foot and their horses plodding wearily along behind. Slung across the back of Irlaav's horse was a tawny spotted cat: not so large as a bear, larger than a boar hound. When a girl watching the herds called out her sight of the hunters, the rest of the children came running from their tasks to greet the return. The smallest one that could toddle that direction alone still wanted to ask questions of the two, and put a hand to a dangling nazhcreis paw. 

Zheru waited in the camp with Yirei, who was never in the mood to run about. "Your sister always catches what she hunts, doesn't she?"

"Nearly every time," Yirei said. "Take them a drink, and ask her if there have been any injuries."

"You'll have to tell me how to ask that," Zheru said, but at least he had an excuse to follow the children, and see the dead beast up close. Its eyes were as glassy as that of any animal killed in hunt or butchery. The matted gore at its throat showed where a spear had found its mark; its sides were only lightly scratched, and its back unmarked beneath the narrow black mane, like a horse's, that stretched from its ears to just below its neck.

Irlaav took the skin of fermented milk that Zheru had brought, handed him the reins to her horse, and strode away without any response to his question. If she had taken injury, he couldn't see it. Aicra had a brown splash of dried blood marking up one torn jacket sleeve, and so Zheru repeated the question in that direction as best he could.

"Nothing for Yirei to worry about," Aicra said, slowly and with distinctly separated words, as if he were speaking to a very small child. He waved Zheru off, watching Irlaav walk away.

Zheru felt a married man ought to know better than to stare in that way, especially in public. Barbarians had no manners when it came to their interests in bed, or--whatever one ought to call such interests, when the people involved didn't find it worth their time to build and cart about actual beds. He knew many impolite ways to describe the matter, but all the polite ones involved marriage or beds or other such euphemistic words that the barbaric lifestyle supported poorly. He rolled his eyes, knowing the man wasn't watching _him_ , and took Irlaav's weary horse to the tents where it could be more conveniently unburdened and stripped down of tack. 

One of the many children of the camp came to take the horse to the stream after Zheru had tack and dead nazhcreis removed. A girl of ten or so, shirtless as so many of the children were--though presumably they would find coats when summer ended--and whose name he didn't know. It seemed a failing, to not know the children apart as he had the few children of the mule train, but Yirei had never made a point of teaching him their names, as he had made sure Zheru could name every adult in camp. Whether that was barbarian custom or Yirei's own interests had never been clear.

Never clear, as with many other things. Zheru folded his arms across his chest, staring at the nazhcreis on the ground. There wasn't enough context for him to judge anything Yirei told him. It was all inescapably unknowable, and knowably inescapable. He spoke only what bits of the language Yirei taught him, knew only the cultural practices Yirei cared to explain, had only the skills Yirei decided to pass on. And unlike being a child, there was no clear route to moving beyond that sort of control. Not unless he followed the route that poor kidnapped scholar had, and simply...assimilated. Became sufficiently part of the barbarian group that others treated him like one of their own.

Which meant never another opera, and never another novel, and never another cup of coffee at two in the morning, surrounded by people speaking his language.

Irlaav clapped him on the shoulder. "Stop dreaming," she said, while he was still trying to work out how she had appeared so suddenly at his side. "Haven't you any work to do?"

"No," Zheru said. It was a word he could produce effortlessly in her language; there were about five of those, and a great many more he could speak awkwardly, or occasionally when memory supplied them to him.

"So. You think you're a hunter." She took a knife from her belt, and offered it to him hilt-first. "Make yourself useful, if you can decutere it."

There was a verb in there that he didn't recognize, but the meaning was clear enough. He took the knife she offered exactly as he had taken her horse's reins earlier. Maybe it wasn't symbolic at all. But given what she had said that morning--well. Yirei would tell him he thought about these things too much, wouldn't he? "I can," he said carefully. Another easy verb, even if he disliked the vowel in the center of it.

Irlaav folded her arms, and waited.

Zheru's ears flattened back. He set them up deliberately, and crouched down beside the body of the nazhcreis. It was still a little warm, even laid out in the shade cast by a tent. He rolled it to its back, spreading out the limbs. "This would be easier with a gutting hook," he said in Ethuverazhin, "but we suppose that would be too much to hope for." The blade looked sharp enough that he didn't care to test it against a finger to be sure. "The cut through the throat is not what we would call a clean one, but placed well enough to do the job. Was that yours?"

"You talk too much," she said, in her own language.

"We feel that we speak exactly enough." There was a certain pleasure in addressing her with Ethuverazhin, which she understood about as well, he thought, as he understood her language. He set the knife to the creature's sternum, and tested how well he could cut down to shallow bone, the better to judge how he ought to manage more delicate areas. The fur wasn't so dense as that of a bear, nor the hide so tough as that of a boar, which would make his work that much easier. He found that he very much wanted to impress her.

It would have been satisfying, and petty, to pretend incompetence. But he didn't want that kind of satisfaction, when he had been granted something like a concession.

She squatted down beside him to watch him work. Every child in camp could sit that in position for what seemed like hours, when working on tasks near the ground. It made Zheru's legs cramp up if he tried it for long; by the time he was ready to begin working the skin away from the cuts he made, he had moved to kneeling in the dirt, his sleeves rolled up to avoid blood spatters. There would be no helping his fingernails.

"We don't suppose you possess a fingernail brush," he asked Irlaav. She was a silent presence nearby, and he refused to look at her while in the midst of his work to see if she was watching him, or merely taking her rest nearby. "We would ask for soap after this, but as Yirei insists it only be used for medical treatment, there is no point in trying."

She snorted quietly, and said nothing.

"Of course, if this were a proper hunting trip, there would be a lodge to return to, or something along those lines." He kept his hands moving as he spoke. "Tents are rather more pastoral than we have ever found agreeable. Though we suppose, on reflection, that 'pastoral' is the wrong word for this, as in our land even shepherds return to houses when they are not out sleeping with their flocks. Perhaps we should simply be glad that we are not required to bed down with the sheep. They smell."

"You like sheep as much as I do," she said, amused now. "You'd make a lousy shepherd. All talking, no watching for nazhcreis."

"How lucky for all of us, then, that no one has attempted to make us a shepherd." He dropped into silence himself to work on a difficult area around the paws. The pads of the nazhcreis's feet spread wider than his palm.

"Good hands," Irlaav said, after a time. 

"You sound surprised."

"That you're useful? Yes, a bit." She didn't bother to pretend incomprehension at his words, even though she kept to her own language as much as he kept to his.

He shot a glance her way. "Aren't you the one who stole us?"

"I chose you," she said lazily, with a flash of her fangs, "because you seemed pretty and biddable. Utility found afterward is a gift." She laughed. "Or a fair trade, since you aren't so biddable as you seemed."

Zheru didn't much like the word _biddable_ , which was, in her language, the same word used for comfortable places to sit, or a jacket that fit well. "How unfortunate for you."

"When you finish with that, you could come back to the tent with me," Irlaav said.

He was not such a fool that he couldn't understand what she was suggesting, there. "When we finish this task, we intend to go wash."

"Do you? The little lamb does love the water, poor thing." She stood up, and stretched her arms overhead. "Would you rather be borrowed or kept?"

And that was another question that meant more than its surface. He turned his attention back to the skinning. "My tutors would have called that a false dichotomy, Irlaav."

She ruffled his hair, the way she sometimes did to Yirei, and walked away. Maybe she hadn't understood those words. Or maybe she didn't find his conversation entertaining, compared to other ways he might be.

Zheru chewed at the corner of his lip, trying not to think about some matters too deeply. There was work for his hands, and that was something, wasn't it? To feel useful.


End file.
